Firefox

Six COUNTER MEASURES

By the time Kontarsky came aboard the First Secretary's Tupolev Tu-144, the moment after the giant supersonic airliner had rolled to a halt on the runway at Bilyarsk, dashing up the mobile passenger-gangway in which he had ridden from the hangar, the First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party had already been told of the theft of the Mig-31 over the flight-deck UHF. As he was ushered into the military command section of the aircraft, aft of the passenger accommodation, the equivalent of the war command office on board the U.S. President's aircraft, he was confronted by what was, in fact, a council of war. The room was already filled with heavy cigar smoke.

Kontarsky saluted rigidly, and kept his eyes straight ahead. Only the back of a radio-operator's head at the far end of the cigar-shaped room filled his vision. Yet he knew that the eyes of the room's principal occupants were on him. An awareness that seemed to seep through the skin like damp told him where each of those powerful men sat. He knew that each was regarding him intently. He understood the details of the expression on each face. Directly in front of him, round the command table, circular in shape and fitted with projection equipment which would throw onto the table a relief map of any part of the Soviet Union, any part of the world, sat the First Secretary himself; on his right sat Kutuzov, Marshal of the Soviet Air Force, a world war ace, and a hardline Communist of the Stalinist school; to the left of the Soviet First Secretary sat Andropov, Chairman of the KGB and his ultimate superior. It was that trinity which so frightened him, which made the moments since he had stepped through the guarded door into this sanctum seem like minutes, hours… endless.

It was the First Secretary who spoke. Kontarsky, still rigidly to attention, and not requested to be at ease or to sit, saw from the corner of his eye the restraining hand of the First Secretary fall on the sleeve of Andropov's suit, and he caught the glint of an overhead strip-light reflected from the gold-rimmed spectacles worn by the Chairman of the KGB.

'Colonel Kontarsky — you will explain what has happened,' the First Secretary said, his voice soft, authoritative. He seemed unhurried. There was no other sound in the room except the steady hiss from a radio. It was nearly three minutes since Gant had taken off in the Mig, yet nothing seemed to have been done.

Now that he had failed, Kontarsky was almost hysterically eager to encourage and exhort the efforts to reclaim — or destroy, he presumed — the stolen aircraft.

He swallowed. 'An American…'he began, and coughed. He kept his eyes looking directly ahead, at the scrubbed neck of the radio-operator. 'An American pilot called Gant is responsible for the theft of the Mig-31, sir.'

'On the contrary, Colonel, it is you who are responsible,' the First Secretary replied, in a voice bereft of menace, bereft of humanity. 'Proceed.'

'He infiltrated the compound here with the aid of various dissident Jews, who are now all dead.'

'Mm. But not before they told you what you wished to know, I presume?'

Kontarsky looked down into the broad, lined face. It was a strong face. He had always thought so. The eyes were like chips of grey stone.

'We — learned nothing…' he managed to say.

There was a silence. He noticed that the radio-operator was sitting more upright in his chair, as if tense. When his eyes returned to the circular table, he could see the First Secretary's strong, veined hand tapping at the sleeve of the Chairman's dark, sober business suit, as if restraining him.

'You — do not know what the destination of the Mig-31 will be?' he heard the First Secretary ask.

'You know nothing?' Kutuzov interposed, shocked. Kontarsky saw the First Secretary glance swiftly at the ageing Marshal who was in full uniform, the sombre blue tinselled with insignia and overlapping decorations. The old pilot fell silent.

'No.' Kontarsky said, and his voice was small and flat, as if the room were deadened, without reverberation.

'Very well,' the First Secretary intoned after a moment of heavy, oppressive silence. At that moment, Kontarsky saw his ruin. For the First Secretary, and for the others, military personnel and KGB, gathered round the circular table, he had ceased to exist. 'You will place yourself under close guard, Colonel.' Kontarsky's lip trembled, and he looked once into the First Secretary's eyes. It was like looking in a mirror that refused to reflect his physical presence. 'You are dismissed.'

When Kontarsky had left the room, the door closing behind him softly, the First Secretary glanced in the direction of the Marshal. He nodded, once, and then turned his head to look at Andropov. He said:

'There is no time now for recriminations. That will come later. It appears obvious to me that this is a CIA venture, a desperate attempt to cancel the huge advantage in air superiority that the aircraft would have given to the Soviet Union. We know nothing else than the man's name, and his official file. It would tell us nothing of use. As each moment passes now, the Mig-31 moves further and further away from us, towards… where, Mihail Ilyich?'

The Marshal of the Soviet Air Force glanced over his shoulder at the back of an operator at a small console.

'Give us the "Wolfpack" map of the U.S.S.R., quickly!' he said.

The operator punched buttons in instant obedience and, as the men seated at the table withdrew their hands, and packets of cigarettes and cigar-cases, the surface of the table registered a projection-map of the Soviet Union, clustered with tiny dots of varying colours. There before them on the screen of the table lay the diagram of the immense outer defences of the Soviet Union. The First Secretary leaned forward across the table, and tapped at the map.

'Bilyarsk,' he said. His ringer traced a circle round the area he had indicated. 'Now, in which direction has he gone?'

'We do not know, First Secretary,' Kutuzov said, his voice gruff. He had had an operation for cancer of the throat two years earlier, and it had left his voice a tired, dry whisper.

He looked across the table, across the glowing projection of the map, at Vladimirov, the tall, lean-faced officer with grey hair and watery blue eyes who sat opposite him. The ruthlessness, the confidence, of that face helped him to regain a little of his calm, after the blow of the theft of the Mig. He had been winded, temporarily paralysed, by what had happened. It had been even more of a body blow than Belenko's defection in a Foxbat four years before. He could still see, in his mind, the bright, swift glint of the fuselage as the aircraft had pulled away from the Tupolev, climbing swiftly. A glimpse, that had been all he had.

Over the UHF, then, had come the information that an unauthorised aircraft had taken off from the single main runway below them in the strengthening light. He had known, with a sudden, sick realisation, what aircraft it had been; before confirmation had flowed in, even as they touched down and the big plane had skipped once and then settled on the runway. Someone, an American, had stolen the greatest aircraft the Soviet Union had ever produced — stolen it.

'What do you think, Vladimirov?' he said.

The tall, lean-faced man glanced down at the map, then looked up, addressing his remarks to the First Secretary. General Med Vladimirov, commandant of the tactical strike arm of the Soviet Air Force, the 'Wolfpack', as it was designated, was worried. He, too, understood the problem — how to trace an untraceable aircraft — but he did not intend to allow the First Secretary to see his doubts. Then, as lethargy seemed to have left him, he spoke.

'I suggest a staggered sector scramble, First Secretary,' he said directly, 'in two areas. We must put up as many planes as we can, along our southern and northern borders.'

'Why there?'

'Because, First Secretary,' he said, looking down at the map, 'this lunatic must refuel if he is to fly the aircraft to a place of complete safety. He will not refuel in the air — we would know if some mother-plane were waiting for him over neutral or hostile sky.'

'What is the range of this aircraft?' General Leonid Borov asked, seated next to Vladimirov. Borov was commandant of the ECM (Electronic Counter-Measures) section of the Soviet Air Force. He, it would be, in the event of a pre-emptive strike by the West, who would coordinate the radar and missile defences with the air defences.

'It would be fully fuelled,' Kutuzov said. 'Almost three thousand miles maximum, depending on what this American knows, and how he handles the aircraft.'

'Which would put him here — or here,' Vladimirov said, his hand sweeping the Arctic Ocean, then drifting across the expanse of the table to indicate the Iranian border, and then the Mediterranean.

'Why would he go either north or south, Vladimirov?' the First Secretary asked. His voice had become impatient now, and his body seemed eager for activity, as if the blood were tinglingly returning to his limbs after cramp.

'Because, First Secretary, any pilot who ran the risk of the Moscow defences would be committing suicide — even in a plane that allows no radar trace!'

There was a brief silence. All of them there, the five men round the circular table, and the team of guards, ciphermen, radio-operators and aides to the ranking officers, all of them understood that the unvoiceable had been uttered. Now that the American had stolen the Mig he had turned that unique fact to his advantage, the fact that the airplane's defences incorporated an anti-radar system.

'It works too well!' Kutuzov growled in his characteristic whisper. 'It works too damn well!'

'The American knows of it?' Andropov said, speaking for the first time. Heads turned in the direction of the bland, urbane Chairman of the KGB. He seemed unabashed by the failure sustained by one of his officers, the monumental failure. Vladimirov smiled thinly. Perhaps he thought, with a hardline pro-Stalinist First Secretary, the Chairman considered himself untouchable. He continued looking at the man across the table from him, who looked like nothing so much as a prosperous, efficient Western businessman, rather than the head of the most powerful police and intelligence force in the world.

'He must know,' Vladimirov said, ice in his voice. 'Your man's security must have been full of holes, Chairman, for the CIA to have got him this far.'

The First Secretary's hand slapped the table once, the projection-map jiggling momentarily under the impact.

'No recriminations! None. I want action, Vladimirov — and quickly! How much time do we have?'

Vladimirov looked at his watch. The time was six-twenty-two. The Mig had been airborne for seven minutes.

'He has more than a thousand miles to go before he crosses any Soviet border, First Secretary. He will travel at sub-sonic speed for the most part, because he will want to conserve fuel, and because he will not want to betray his flight-path with a supersonic footprint — we have more than an hour, even should he fly directly…'

'One hour?' The First Secretary realised he was in a foreign element, that Vladimirov and the other military experts would possess a time-scale where minutes stretched, were elastic — in which all things could be accomplished. He added: 'It is enough. What do you propose — Kutuzov?'

'As "Wolfpack" Commandant suggests, First Secretary, a staggered sector scramble. We must institute a search for this aircraft, a visual search. We must put in the air a blanket of aircraft, a net in which he will be caught. All our "Wolfpack" and "Bearhunt" squadrons know this sequence clearly. It leaves no holes, no gaps.. We merely have to institute it in reverse order. "Bearhunt" will begin, seeking the American within the area three hundred miles within our borders — "Wolfpack" can be scrambled at the same time, patrolling the borders themselves.'

'I see.' The First Secretary was thoughtful, silent for a moment, then he said: 'I agree.'

There was a relaxation of suspense in the War Command Centre of the Tupolev. It was from that room that the First Secretary, if ever the need arose, would order Armageddon to commence — a replica, except for its size, of the War Command Centre in the heart of the Kremlin. For the Soviet leader, and those members of the High Command who were present, it was the only stroke of fortune that early morning, that they possessed, in portable form, the nerve-centre of the Soviet defence system. The suspense that vanished was replaced by the heady whiff of tension, the tension of the runner on his bldcks, the tension that precedes violent activity.

'Thank you, First Secretary,' Vladimirov said. He got to his feet, his thin figure stooping over the table, studying the coloured zones overlying the topography of the map, picking out the spots of colour that indicated his squadron bases, and their linked missile bases.

'Bleed in the "Bearhunt" status map,' he ordered.

As he watched, the numbers of coloured dots increased, filling the inland spaces of the map at regular intervals. He brushed his hand across the table, smiled grimly to himself, and said: 'Scramble, with Seek-briefing, and in SSS sequence, squadrons in White through Red sectors, and Green through Brown sectors. Put up "Bearhunt" squadrons, same briefing, G through N.' He rubbed his chin, and listened to the chatter of the cipher machines, waited for the transmission of the coded signals to the Communications Officer, a young Colonel seated before a console behind him, with his team of three ranged beside him.

When the high-speed transmission had begun, Vladimirov looked at the First Secretary, and said: 'What do you wish done when they sight the Mig?'

The First Secretary glared at him, and replied: 'I wish to talk to this American who has stolen the Soviet Air Force's latest toy — obtain the frequency — if he will not land the aircraft as directed, then it must be destroyed — completely!'

The inertial navigator that had been fitted into the Firefox was represented on the control panel by a small display similar to the face of a pocket calculator. It also possessed a series of buttons marked, for example, 'Track', 'Heading', 'Ground Speed', and 'Coordinates'. He could feed into it known navigational information and the on-board computer would calculate and display such information as distance to travel, time for distance. By starting the programmes in the computer at a known time and position, the computer could measure changes in speed and direction, and keep track of the aircraft's position. Standard procedure required the data displayed to be confirmed by more conventional means — such as visual sightings of landmarks.

Gant had an appointment to keep in the airspace north-west of Volgograd, with the early morning civilian flight from Moscow, a rendezvous which would establish him as travelling towards the southern border of the Soviet Union — a fact he very much wanted to establish in the minds of those who would be controlling the search for him.

He throttled back slightly, keeping his speed at little more than six hundred and fifty knots. He had not pushed the Firefox to its supersonic speeds because, travelling at his present height of almost 15,000 feet, the supersonic footprint he would leave behind him would act like a giant arrow as to his direction for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. There were another twenty-three minutes to his rendezvous.

He had made a minute inspection of the equipment packed into the Firefox. Most of it, communications and radar especially, had been built into the simulator at Langley, and was of a type which closely paralleled U.S. developments in the same fields. They weren't the reason why he was stealing the Firefox. One reason lay in the two mighty Turmansky turbojets which produced in excess of 50,000 lbs of thrust each, giving the plane its incredible speed in excess of Mach 5. Another reason was in the magic of its anti-radar system which, as dead Baranovich had suggested, was non-mechanical, but rather some kind of treatment of, or application to, the skin of the aircraft, and a further reason lay in the thought-guided missiles and cannon the Firefox carried.

The sky ahead of him was clear, pale blue, the rising sun to port of him dazzling off the perspex, the glare diffused and deadened by the tinted mask of the flying helmet. There was nothing to see.

Gant had no interest in the stretching, endless steppe below him. His eyes hardly left the instrument panel, especially the radar which would warn him of the approach of aircraft, or of missiles. One of his ECM devices, which Baranovich had explained in his final briefing was a constant monitor of the radar-emissions from the terrain over which he passed. Effectively, the 'Nose', as Baranovich had called it, sniffed out radar signals directed at him. The 'Nose' seemed unnecessary to Gant, since he could not be picked up on any radar screen on the ground or in the air but, Baranovich had explained and he had seen, a visual sighting of him would lead to intense radar activity on the ground, using the sighting plane as the guide to his whereabouts. In addition, as long as he went on monitoring the read-out on the tiny screen of the 'Nose', he would know where, and in what pattern, missile-radars on the ground below him were.

Gant knew what form the search for him would take. The Russians would guess he would head either direct north or direct south — that to the east was only, eventually, and long after he ran out of fuel, the People's Republic of China, while to the west, between himself and a friendly country, lay the massive defences that surrounded Moscow. He knew that 'Bearhunt' squadrons would be up looking for him, and he also suspected the Russians would be using their sound-detection system — NATO-designated, with inappropriate levity, 'Big Ears' — which in the unpopulated interior of the Russian heartland was designed to detect low-flying aircraft that might have eluded the radar net. Gant had no idea of how numerous might be such installations, nor how efficient they were in obtaining accurate bearings on machines moving at more than six hundred miles an hour — nor did he know at what altitude the system ceased to be effective.

One other thing, he reminded himself. Satellite photography, high-speed and infra-red. He didn't know whether it would be effective within the tiny time-scale of his flight. But it was something else to worry about. He was fighting an electronic war. He was like an asthmatic man with heavy, creaking boots trying to move through a room of insomniacs without disturbing them.

Gant had no idea of the nature, or precise location, of his refuelling point. In his memory were a sequence of different coordinates which he was to feed into the inertial navigator.

He had left the UHF channel open, knowing that they would attempt to contact him from Bilyarsk. In fact, he hoped and expected that they would do so. As soon as he spoke, anybody within a range of two hundred miles of him, using UDF equipment would not only pick up the broadcast, but would be able to obtain, with the assistance of two other fix lines, an almost instant fix on his position. In his case, it would only help to confirm the decoy of his journey south.

He suspected that the silence since his take-off was caused by the take-over of command by the War Command Centre on board the First Secretary's Tupolev. He waited with impatience, a surge of vanity in him wanting, above the desire of being asumed to be heading towards the southern borders of the U.S.S.R., to hear from the First Secretary, or the Marshal of the Soviet Air Force, at the least. He wanted to feed upon their anger, their threats.

The radio crackled into life. The voice was one he recognised from newsreels, from interviews — that of the First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. Involuntarily, his eyes flicked to the instruments, checking his heading and speed, checking the conformity of the dials and readouts.

'I am speaking to the individual who has stolen the property of the U.S.S.R.,' the voice said, levelly, without inflection, almost as if on purpose to disappoint him. 'Can you hear me, Mr. Gant? I presume you have discarded your military rank since you became employed by — shall we say, other persons?' Gant smiled at the man's emphasis, and his caution.

Ever since the U-2 incident, he thought. Softly, softly. It was not to be admitted, not yet, that he was working for the CIA, even that he was an American.

He said: 'Go ahead — I'm listening.'

'Are you enjoying your ride, Mr. Gant — you like our new toy?'

'It could be improved,' Gant said laconically.

'Ah — your expert opinion, Mr. Gant.'

Gant could almost see the big man, with the strong, square face, sitting before the transmitter in the War Command Centre, while the frenzy of activity around him went almost unnoticed. Already, no doubt, someone had pushed beneath his gaze the details of the fix they had obtained on him. At that moment, however, it was between the two of them, between one man in an airplane, and another man with the powers of a god at his disposal. Yet Gant held all the cards, the voice seemed to say. Gant remained unfooled. He understood the fury of the search for him. He was being played like a fish, lulled, until they found him.

'You could say that,' he said. 'Don't you want to threaten me, or something?'

'I will do so, if that is what you wish,' was the level reply. 'But first, I will merely ask you to bring back what does not belong to you.'

'And then you'll forget the whole thing, uh?'

There was what sounded like soft laughter at the other end of the UHF. Then: 'I don't think you would believe that, Mr. Gant — would you? No, of course not. The CIA will have filled your head with nonsense about the Lubyanka, and the security services of the Soviet Union. No. All I will say is that you will live, if you return immediately. It is calculated that no more than forty flying minutes would be required before we would be able to sight you back over Bilyarsk. It has been a nice try, Mr. Gant, as you would say — but now, the game is most definitely over!'

Gant waited before replying, then said: 'And the alternatives…?'

'You will be obliterated, Mr. Gant — simply that. You will not be allowed to hand over the Mig-31 to the security services of your country. We could not allow that to happen.'

'I understand. Well, let me tell you, sir — I like this plane. It fits me. I think I'll just keep it, for the moment…'

'I see. Mr. Gant, as you will be aware, I am not interested in the life of one rogue pilot with a poor health record — I was hoping to save the millions of roubles that have been poured into the development of this project. I see that you won't allow that to happen. Very well. You will not, of course, make it to wherever you are heading. Goodbye, Mr. Gant.'

Gant flicked off the UHF and smiled to himself behind the anonymity of the flying mask. All he really had to worry about, he told himself — the one factor in the game which could cancel out all his advantages — was burning in the hangar at Bilyarsk: the second Firefox. If they could continue to trace him, and put that up against him… He shrugged.

The civilian flight from Moscow to Volgograd took him by surprise. Suddenly, there was a glint of sunlight off duralumin, and he was on top of it. The vapour trail, at that hour of the morning in those air conditions, had become visible very late. He had intended to cross the nose of the Tupolev, but there was the short contrail away to port. He switched off the auto-pilot.

He rolled the Firefox onto a wingtip, felt the pressure-suit perform its anti-G function, tightening then loosening round his thighs and upper body, and he pulled the aircraft round. The bright, hard glint of the Tupolev Tu-134 was almost directly ahead of him now. He had to give its flight-crew the opportunity to make a positive visual identification, and he had to be heading south as he crossed the nose.

He banked away to port, accelerating into a dive. He moved away from the airliner, losing sight of it. It registered as a bright green blip near the centre of the radar screen. When he had decided that he had slid across and behind it, and accelerated sufficiently to overtake it again, he straightened onto his original course, watching the blip attempt to regain its position to one side of the screen's centre line. He steadied the Firefox like an eager horse as the airliner moved into visual range to starboard, and he could see the contrail and the tiny glint of sunlight. He eased open the throttles, and the Firefox surged forward on what would appear a collision course to the pilot of the airliner.

There was never a moment when he considered he might have misjudged the distance, the heading. He rolled the plane onto a wingtip, and dived away from the oncoming Tupolev, now filling his starboard window. They would have seen him, and panicked, since their radar screens would be stupefyingly empty. The slim fuselage, and the huge engines of an unknown aircraft, suddenly appearing, would be imprinted on their minds by fear. He rolled the plane into a Mach descent, a thousand feet below the airliner, and listened to the chatter of the pilot over the Russian airline frequency, smiling in satisfaction.

The ground rushed at the Firefox as he screamed down from 15,000 feet. He trimmed slightly nose-up, then pulled out of the suicidal dive, levelling at little more than two hundred feet above the flat terrain of the steppes. The pressure on the G-suit was evident, uncomfortable, as he was thrust back into the pilot's couch. His vision blurred, reddened, and then cleared, and he read off the instruments before him.

He switched in the auto-pilot and fed in the next coordinates that he had memorised so exactly, and the inertial navigator took over, settling the Firefox onto its new course. He had been seen, and the sighting would confirm the UDF fix they must have. They would have confirmed the fact that he was heading south, beyond Volgograd, towards perhaps the border with Iran, and some kind of rendezvous in Israel, or over the Mediterranean. The search would flatten in that sector of the Soviet defence system. Now he had need of at least some fair proportion of the Firefox's speed capability. He opened the throttles and watched the rpm gauges swing over, and the Mach-counter which was his only intimation, other than his ground speed read-out, that he was travelling faster than the speed of sound. He was heading east, towards the mountain chain of the Urals, seeking the shelter, he hoped, of their eastern slopes before turning due north. He could not employ the real cruising capability of the plane. Nevertheless, it was with satisfaction that he watched the numbers slipping through the Mach-counter… Mach 1,1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5…

Just below him, the flat, empty, silent expanse of the steppes fled past, receded. The buoyancy he had felt, the clearness and pleasure of the first moments of the flight, returned to him. He was flying the greatest war-plane ever built. It was a meeting of that aircraft, and the only human being good enough to fly it. His egotism, cold, unruffled, calculating, was fulfilled. A visual sighting at the height he was travelling became less and less likely. The supersonic footprint of his passage was narrow at two hundred feet, and there was little below him of human manufacture or human residence to record it. All he needed to avoid was the 'Big Ears' sound detection network. He had no idea of its capability, or location. In the Urals, however, the echoes set up by his passage would confuse any such equipment.

Suddenly, in a violent alteration of mood, he felt naked and his equilibrium seemed threatened. He was running for cover. Despite his better judgement, he pushed the throttles forward and watched, with satisfaction, as the Mach-counter reeled off the mounting numbers. Mach 1.8, 1.9, Mach 2, 2.1, 2.2…

He knew he was wasting fuel, precious fuel, yet he did not pull back the throttles. He watched the numbers mount until he had reached Mach 2.6, and then he steadied the speed. Now, the terrain below him was merely a blur. He was in a soundless cocoon, removed from the world. He began to feel safe as he switched in the TFR (Terrain Following Radar) which was his eyes and his reactions, operating as it did via the autopilot. He had not expected to need it until he entered the foothills of the Urals, but at his present speed of almost two thousand mph, he had to switch them in. He was no longer flying the aircraft. The Urals were only minutes away now and there, safe, he would regain control of the Firefox. His sense of well-being began to return. The sheer speed of the aircraft deadened the ends of nerves. The steadied figure of Mach 2.6 on the Mach-counter was brilliantly clear in his vision. At this speed, despite the draining-away of the irreplaceable kerosene, a visual sighting was as good as impossible. He was safe, running and safe…

'Give the alert to the contingency refuelling locations at once, would you?' Aubrey said blandly. He was speaking via a scrambler to Air Commodore Latchford at Strike Command, High Wycombe. He had, that moment, received a report from Latchford which indicated a definite lift-off by Gant from Bilyarsk. The AEWR (Airborne Early Warning Radar) had recorded signs of a staggered sector scramble amongst border squadrons of the Red Air Force and this, in conjunction with radio — and code-monitoring which had shown signs of furious code-communication between sections of the Red Air Force, and between the First Secretary and the Admiral of the Red Banner Northern Fleet, as well as Russian ships in the Mediterranean — all of this evidence amounted to a sighting of Gant lifting clear of the runway at Bilyarsk.

Latchford affirmed an immediate alert for both contingency refuelling points to begin transmission of the homing-signal which operated on the very special frequency of Gant's transistor-innards which would lead him home.

'Mother Two and Mother Three will go on alert now,' the Air Commodore said. 'You'll take care of Mother One yourself — at least, I presume you will, since I have no idea where to find her?' There was a chuckle at the other end of the line. Latchford had had to know about the two contingency refuelling points, but had been kept in the dark concerning the one Gant was expected to use. Aubrey sensed a communion of tension, of suppressed excitement.

'Yes, Captain Curtin will take care of Mother One,' Aubrey assured him, and then added: 'Thank you, Air Commodore — your news comes, if I may say, like a ray of pure sunshine. Many thanks.' He listened to Latchford's throaty chuckle for a moment, seeming to draw comfort from the sound, and then replaced the receiver.

Buckholz, elbows on his desk, was watching him intently as he looked up. 'They confirm? All that activity isn't just because they caught our boy?' he enquired.

Aubrey shook his head. 'No, my dear Buckholz,' Aubrey said blandly. 'AEW Radar confirms the pre-dieted activity on the part of the Red Air Force, northern and southern borders — Gant is in the air.'

Buckholz breathed deeply, his breath exhaling loudly. He turned to Anders, almost asleep next to him, and grinned with the pure self-satisfaction of a child.

'Thank God,' he whispered.

There was a silence, broken by Curtin's creaking descent from the step-ladder. When he regained the floor, he said to Aubrey: 'I didn't reckon on doing the office-boy's job when I volunteered for this!' He grinned as he said it. 'You want me to tell Washington to alert Mother One, Mr. Aubrey?'

Aubrey nodded. 'Yes, my boy — do that now, would you? If the weather's still holding, that is.'

Curtin walked back to the map, picked up a pointer and tapped at a satellite weather-photograph pinned high on the wall. 'That's the latest — two a.m. your time. All clear.'

'And the track of Mother One?'

'Constant — moving slowly south, in an area of loosened pack. Temperature low enough. She's holding.'

'Good. Then put through your call, Captain. Mother One it is.'

Before Curtin could place the call, they were startled by the chatter of a teletype from the Code Room. Aubrey watched Shelley as the younger man ripped the sheet of flimsy from the machine.

'Communications picked this up only minutes ago,' he said, a slight smile on his tired face. 'Plain language. Picked up by the operator listening in on the Soviet airline frequency.'

'Ah,' Aubrey remarked. 'And…?'

'He was spotted north-west of Volgograd — almost tore the nose off the airliner, before they lost sight of him. The pilot was screaming his head off, before someone told him to keep quiet!'

'Good.'

Aubrey inspected the sheet of paper, and then offered it to Buckholz who had crossed to perch on the table.

Buckholz stared at it, as if needing to be convinced, and then said: 'Good. Damn good.' He looked into Aubrey's face, and added: 'So far, so good?'

'I agree, my dear Buckholz. Hopefully, the Russians are now scrambling everything, including the mess bar, to the south of Gant.' He rubbed his chin, and said: 'I still worry about "Big Ears", you know. Gant must be making a frightful amount of noise, heading east to the Urals.'

'It is not, my dear Kutuzov, a war situation,' the First Secretary said, seated in his chair before the round table. His eyes disregarded the map of European Russia, from the Polish border to the Urals, from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea, despite its glowing squares of colour, despite the winking strings of tiny lights that signalled the interceptor stations with fighters in the air, despite the other lights forming links in the glowing chain which signalled the inissile sites on full war alert. Kutuzov seemed, on the other side of the table, unable to remove his fixed stare from the hypnotic projection before him. Reluctantly, it seemed, he lifted his eyes, and gazed at the First Secretary.

'You have considered that this might be some kind of supreme bluff by the Americans, First Secretary. To distract us from looking northward, while this single aircraft attempts to escape to the south.' It was not a question. Marshal Kutuzov was evidently serious in his supposition.

The First Secretary sighed and said: 'No, Kutuzov. This is a CIA venture — with the backing of the office of the President, and the Pentagon, no doubt.' His palms were raised from the desk to prevent interruption. 'But it is no more than a wildcat affair. Elaborate, yes. Far-sighted, yes. Well-planned and executed, yes. All of those things. But it is not war! No. The CIA will have arranged a refuelling point for this madman, somewhere — our computers will no doubt tell us the most likely places. But, if we shoot down the Mig-31, and even if we destroy the refuelling-vehicle, the Americans will act dumb, as they say. They will do nothing. And that — all of you…' His voice was suddenly raised, so that the background chatter of the Command Centre stilled, and all eyes turned to him. 'All of you understand this. If we can destroy, or recover, the aircraft, then we will hear no more of the matter.'

'You are sure?' Kutuzov said. His face expressed a desire to be convinced. He had been staring at the edge of a void from the moment the idea had occurred to him, that he was witnessing the opening move in the end-game for the world.

'I am — certain. The Americans, and the British, both want this aircraft, because they are aware of its potential. They both have made massive cuts in their defence budgets during the past few years, especially in the area of development and research. Therefore, despite the free gift of the Mig-25 some years ago, they have, as we know, nothing on the drawing-board remotely capable of matching the Mig-31.'

He turned a suddenly baleful glare upon Andropov, standing at his shoulder. 'Chairman Andropov — the security for this project was — unforgiveable!'

Andropov nodded slowly. The strip-lighting of the room glinted from his spectacles. Vladimirov, standing near Kutuzov, sensed the man's anger. Also, he understood the suppressed anger of the First Secretary which had prompted the icy remark.

'Yes — unfortunately, First Secretary.' He looked across at the two military men on the other side of the table. 'I remember that Marshal Kutuzov and General Vladimirov both wished the security to be strengthened, after the initial trials.' He smiled, coldly. 'It would appear they were right.'

The Americans knew far too much,' Kutuzov growled, in a voice hardly more than a throaty whisper.

The First Secretary raised his hand. He realised that he had initiated yet another internecine squabble between the military and the KGB.

'Leave it at that,' he said levelly. 'It will be examined thoroughly. It would appear, from the Chairman's initial enquiries, that Colonel Kontarsky gambled — and failed.' Behind the First Secretary, Andropov nodded slowly, then looked across the table.

Neither Kutuzov nor Vladimirov said anything. Kontarsky had played a lone hand. He had attempted to use the security of the Bilyarsk project to enhance his promotion, and his reputation. It had happened before. The KGB officer at the head of KGB observation-security in the Middle East, in 1967, had held back information vital to the Kremlin and to the Kremlin's satellite, Egypt, concerning the Israeli preparations for war, until they had taken him by surprise. Department V of the KGB, the assassination department, had liquidated him soon afterwards. Kontarsky would not survive his failure.

There was a knock at the door. The First Secretary's KGB bodyguard opened it and accepted the sheaf of papers that were handed to him by someone in a white coat. Then the door was closed.

'Thank you,' the First Secretary said. He studied the papers for a moment, then looked up, and passed them to Kutuzov. 'Tell me what they mean.'

The old Marshal studied them intently, after plucking a pair of battered, wire-rimmed spectacles from the breast-pocket of his tunic. The background chatter of the code and communications operators was hardly sufficient to drown the noise of the papers as he shuffled through them. When he had finished, he pulled his glasses from his face, and handed the papers to Vladimirov.

Coughing, he said: 'It is a damage report on the second Mig, First Secretary, as you are aware. It would appear that the dissidents failed to put the aircraft out of commission.'

It suddenly became clear to Vladimirov, looking across the table to the First Secretary and Andropov, that the War Command Centre was a venue of desperation. To those two pre-eminently powerful men, who did not understand the air or aircraft, this was some kind of panacea; this was what they were hoping for, what they had been anticipating with an almost virginal excitement. They truly believed that, if they could only put up the second prototype, they would be able to bring down the running American. He dismissed the beginnings of a smile from his face.

'How soon — how soon can it be ready to fly — armed?' the First Secretary asked, his voice unsettled with excitement.

'Perhaps an hour, perhaps less,' Vladimirov put in, consulting the papers in his hand. 'It was, of course, in a condition of flight readiness as a back-up to the PP1, but it has to be cleared of foam, pre-flighted and armed, First Secretary.'

'But we need to know where he is, exactly!' growled Kutuzov in his familiar whisper. Vladimirov realised that his superior was less alive to the political niceties of the atmosphere in the War Command Centre. All that the First Secretary wanted was to get the second plane airborne. He would not welcome reminders of the practical difficulties of a seek and destroy mission for the aircraft.

'I know that, Kutuzov!' the First Secretary snapped, silencing the old Marshal. He looked round the walls of the room, as if the bent backs of the operators would inspire him, supply him with the answer he required.

Vladimirov sensed his desperation beneath the icy calm, beneath the strength of the man's personality. For him, the staggered sector scramble provided the only hope, slim though it was. Something nagged at the back of his mind, something he had first thought of in the early years of the Mig-31 project, something that he had raised as a possible objection to the anti-radar system that had been developed, and thrust upon the Bilyarsk development. It had been a cool voice, a sprinkling of water on a burning enthusiasm.

Vladimirov was, by nature, a cool, rational man, a strategist. As O.C. 'Wolfpack' commandant of the Russian interceptor force, he had found his fulfilment as a military man. He, with Kutuzov, had pressed for the delay in defence spending that would ensure the rapid production of hundreds of Mig-31s, to replace the Foxbats that at present formed the strongest card in the Russian suit. The thought-guided weapons-system developed for the aircraft was, he recognised, its real trump, together with its huge range and frightening speed. It would put the Red Air Force into a different league, beyond the present or immediately future capabilties of the RAF and the USAF.

He wandered away from the tense, electric atmosphere surrounding the circular table in the middle of the War Command Centre, and listened with half an ear to the flow of decoded reports issuing from the teams of operators. Everything was being recorded, ready for instant playback if there was need to consult the reports.

The sighting north-west of Volgograd filled him with suspicion. A former ace, he suspected the obvious. He had been forced to respect Gant, the American pilot. Studying the KGB file on him, transmitted by wire-print from the Centre in Moscow, he appreciated the selection of the man by the CIA. Gant was a rogue pilot, a Vietnam ace. Vladimirov hoped that, had the roles been reversed, he would have had the foresight and the daring to select such a man.

He felt he knew Gant, felt the need of the man to steal the Mig, to prove it could be done. Gant would want to complete the mission. He would be determined to take the Mig home.

From the pilot's report, it had been made to appear that the American had been surprised by the sudden appearance of the airliner to starboard of him, right on a collision course. Vladimirov knew that Gant's radar would have warned him of the airliner's presence in plenty of time to avoid such a sighting. And Gant was a fine pilot, perhaps the best if his record told no lies. Even in an unfamiliar aircraft, he would not have made such an error of airmanship. Vladimirov was sure that a simulator had been built at Langley, Virginia, to assist Gant in his training. He mentally cursed Kontarsky who, in the harsh glare of failure, appeared a gross fool. A great deal of information must have passed to the Americans over the past years, a great deal.

He dismissed Gant from his mind. To think of him was to dwell on the unchangeable past. No, there was something more important, something that might circumvent Gant's supreme advantage of the radar immunity of the Mig-31. What the devil was it?

He rubbed at his chin as he walked, a continuous, harsh motion of the hand. The voice of an operator repeating a communication struck him clearly. The words slid across his consciousness, without resonating.

'Positive sound-trace, installation at Orsk…' the voice at his side was saying. He was unaware of the stillness suddenly around him, unaware that the operator had turned to look up at him. No, he thought, it had nothing to do with sound. It was — was… Then he had it, elusive, yet brilliantly clear, even as his mind registered the silence around him and he saw the expectant face of the radio-operator from the corner of his eye.

He had said clearly, a lone voice amid the atmosphere of military and political euphoria, that radar-immunity by and of itself did not render any aircraft, however advanced, completely safe from detection. Infra-red detection equipment, designed not to bounce a signal off a solid object but to detect heat-sources on the ground or in the air, might be used to detect the presence of an aircraft immune to radar. The heat emission from a jet engine would show up on any infrared screen as an orange blip. It would be a poor substitute in tracking and fixing a target, but it would, even within its limitations, cancel some of the total advantage of the Mig-31's anti-radar system. It might prove sufficiently accurate for heat-seeking missiles to be launched in the direction of the prospective target. They would then, with their own sensors, seek out the heat-source that would have shown up on the infra-red screens on the ground. That was it! He looked at his hand in front of his face, and saw that it was quivering.

It was the answer. His staggered sector scramble did not have to rely upon the faint possibility of a clear visual sighting. Every fighter could train its infra-red weapons-aiming system ahead of the plane, in a cone. Anything with a jet engine passing through that cone, in whatever atmospheric conditions, at whatever altitude, would show up as a bright orange heat-spot on the pilot's infra-red detection screen.

He saw the face of the operator, holding one hand to his head like a man with toothache, saw the smile of puzzlement on the face.

'Yes?' he said. 'What did you say?'

'General — there has been an unidentified sound-trace from a low-flying aircraft travelling at more than Mach 2, picked up on the mobile unit west of Orsk.'

'Where is Orsk?' Vladimirov snapped, the excitement in the young face in front of him seeming to become infectious. Without waiting for an answer, the General turned to the man at the map-console, who computed the patterns and details to be fed onto the projection on the table. 'Orsk! Blow up that region for me.' He remembered. 'It's at the southern tip of the Urals…'

He slapped his hand against his forehead, not noticing the silence of the entire War Command Centre as the truth of his suspicions came home to him. Gant had deliberately been sighted travelling south!

'What is the matter, General Vladimirov?' he heard the First Secretary ask. Unconsciously, he waved his hand dismissively in the direction of the voice.

'Get me a confirmation of that report — quickly!' he snapped. 'Call it out to me.'

Swiftly, he crossed to the map beneath the screen of the table, oblivious to the rising anger displayed on the face of the First Secretary. Eagerly, he studied the enlargement of the southern tip of the Urals mountain chain, realised that the area was too small and said: 'Replace this — give me a projection of the Urals, and of as much to the north and south as you can — now.'

His fingers tapped at the table edges as he waited. The map dissolved, and then re-formed. The Urals spread like a livid scar down the centre of the projection. To the south was the brown, dusty-coloured expanse of Iran, and to the north the deepening blue of the Barents Sea and the Arctic Ocean. Still ignoring the First Secretary, who sat at the table like a carved figure, Vladimirov traced his finger across the map, first southwards, towards the Middle East and the Mediterranean; then, more slowly and thoughtfully, the slender, long-nailed finger tracked northward across the map, up the chain of the Urals. It paused over Novaya Zemlya, then pushed on north, then curved in an arc to the north-west into the Arctic Ocean.

When he looked up, it was only to hear the radio-operator who had informed him of the sound trace, saying: 'Trace confirmed, sir. Aircraft, which refused to answer a demand for identification, heading northeast into the mountains. They lost the trace within thirty seconds, but they confirm heading and speed.'

Vladimirov realised that Gant had made his first mistake, had made what might be promoted into a fatal error. He had ignored the demand for identification, atid that made him suspicious. Also, he was traveling far too fast, running for shelter… his fuel could not last as long as he must have hoped at first, at that speed. He studied the map again, realising that Gant was seeking the shelter, from visual and sound detection, of the eastern foothills of the Urals.

Which could only mean… yes, he realised with a mounting excitement, could only mean that his refuelling point lay to the north of the Soviet Union, in the Barents Sea, or above it. He looked up.

The First Secretary had not moved. 'Well?' he said, softly.

'If you will look at the map, First Secretary,' Vladimirov said, sensing Kutuzov at his shoulder, 'I will try to explain my deductions.' Swiftly, he outlined Gant's probable course. When he had finished, he added: 'We can track him, despite his radar-immunity, First Secretary.'

There was a silence and then Andropov, arms folded across his chest and standing behind the First Secretary, said in a soft, ironical voice: 'How?'

Vladimirov explained, as simply as he could, the manner in which the infra-red weapons-aiming system could be used as a directional search-beam. Kutuzov clapped him on the shoulder, and Vladimirov sensed the quiver of excitement in the old man's frame. More distantly, he sensed that he had somehow sealed the succession, that he would be the next Marshal of the Air Force. The prospect did not affect him. At that moment, he was concerned only with the elimination of Gant as a military threat.

'Good — that is good, General Vladimirov,' the First Secretary said. 'You agree, Mihail Ilyich?' Kutuzov nodded. 'This needs no mechanical adjustment?'

'No — merely a coded instruction to that effect from you, or from Marshal Kutuzov.'

The First Secretary nodded. 'What, then, do you suggest, Vladimirov?'

'You must alert units of the Red Banner Northern Fleet, First Secretary. They must begin looking for a surface, or subsurface…' He paused. No, it had to be a surface craft, and even that was unlikely. 'More probably, an aircraft, waiting to refuel the Mig in mid-air, First Secretary.' The Soviet leader nodded. 'Then, we must put up "Wolfpack" squadrons nearest to our northern coastline, to seek out the mother-plane.' He glanced round into Kutuzov's keen eyes. The old man nodded. 'And we alert all missile sites along the First Firechain to expect Gant. They, too, must use their infra-red aiming-systems to search for him, in concert with the "Wolfpack" units.'

Suddenly, his finger stabbed at the map, almost immediately in front of the First Secretary. 'There,' he said. 'Just there. If he follows the Urals to their northernmost point, then he will use the Gulf of Ob, or the gulf to the west of the Yamal Peninsula as a visual sighting, before altering course for his rendezvous with the mother-aircraft. As you can see, First Secretary, there are two fixed units in the First Firechain within range, as well as the mobile link between them, and our "Wolfpack" squadrons based on the peninsula.' He looked up, and there was a smile on his face. 'It will take only minutes to organise, First Secretary — and the American will walk into the most powerful trap ever sprung.' He was still smiling when he said: 'Will you give permission for any Soviet aircraft who gains a visual sighting to act as a target for the missiles — if it becomes necessary?'

Vladimirov heard Kutuzov's indrawn breath, but kept his eyes on the First Secretary. In the man's grey, flinty eyes he could see the succession confirmed. This time, it moved him with a distinct, though momentary, pleasure. The First Secretary merely nodded.

'Of course,' he said.

'Very well, First Secretary — then Gant is dead.'

The journey through the Urals had taken Gant little more than two hours, since in covering the sixteen or more hundred miles from Orsk to Vorkuta through the eastern foothills, he had never exceeded six hundred knots, keeping his speed sub-sonic in order to conserve the fuel he now wished he had not burned in his panic-dash to the cover of the mountains. The lower speed would also stop his presence being betrayed by a supersonic footprint across the sparsely-populated ground below. The foothills had been wreathed in mist, which made visual detection almost impossible, either from the ground or from the air.

Knowledge concerning military installations in the Urals chain was sketchy. Buckholz and Aubrey had been able to provide him with very little in the way of fact. It had been assumed, dubiously, that the eastern slopes of the mountain chain would be the less heavily armed and surveyed. Once he had taken a visual sighting on Orsk, to obtain a bearing, he had fed the coordinates of his northward flight into the inertial navigator, and slotted the aircraft into its flight-path. Then he had again switched in the TFR and the auto-pilot, and passed like a ghost into a grey world of terrain-hugging mist, chill to the eye, featureless as the moon, or the landscape of his memory.

He had feared a return of the dream or, at least, of some of the physical symptoms of the hysterical paralysis — even the nausea. Yet, it had not happened. It was as though he had passed from shadow into light, as if the person he had been before the take-off had been shed like a skin. He spent no time in marvelling at his new, recovered integrity of mind, calmness of thought. It wasn't unfamiliar to him. Even in Vietnam, towards the end, he had been able to fly almost perfectly, leaving behind him, like the uniform in his locker, the wreck of an individual sliding towards the edge.

His ECM instrument for picking up radar-emissions from the terrain below had recorded nothing since the beginning of his flight through the mountains. He had moved in a world cut off, entirely separate, the kind of isolation he had heard NASA men talk about after orbiting the earth in one of the Skylabs, or returning from testing the newest re-entry vehicles. Once he had met Collins one of the lunar astronauts. He had said the same. In his own way, Gant had always felt that removed when his aircraft was on auto-pilot. There was nothing, except a cabin, pressurised, stable, warm — and the human multitude and their planet fled by formlessly as the mist through which he had travelled. That utter isolation was something he had never rid himself of on the ground, not even in violent drinking-jags, or in the relief of Saigon prostitutes. And the reason he sought that lonely superiority of the skies was because the ground had never offered him more than an inferior copy of the same empty isolation. It was just after nine and the mist was clearing at his height, shredding away from the cockpit, so sunlight glanced from the perspex, and the faded blue of the morning sky was revealed. Oh his present heading, he knew he would pass over the Gulf of Kara, that sharp intrusion of the Kara Sea to the west of the Yamal Peninsula within minutes, at this present speed. With the cross-check of a visual bearing on the neck of the gulf, he would be able to feed in the next set of coordinates to the intertial navigator.

He looked ahead. Visibility was not good. There was no sign of water, only the hazy, grey absence of a horizon. He knew he would have to drop down as low as he could, risking visual sighting from the ground, risking the gauntlet of the Firechain which looped across this northern coast. Nevertheless, he had to do it.

The last northern strand of the mountains, limping towards the sea, neared again as he changed altitude, sliding down towards the pockets of mist not yet dispersed by the strengthening sun. He saw the small town of Vorkuta away to port, and knew that his heading was correct and that the sea lay only minutes ahead of him.

Suddenly then, the edge of his radar screen showed the presence of an aircraft, higher and away to starboard; big, probably a Badger long-range reconnaissance plane no doubt returning from a routine patrol out over the Kara Sea and the Arctic Ocean.

Moments passed in which he seemed content just with the knowledge that he was closing on the Badger, judging he would pass well behind it. He assumed that, with a minimum of luck, most of the electronic detection equipment on board the Badger would be shut down that close to its home base. Then, almost with disbelief, three bright orange spots registered on the screen, glowing, climbing, nearing. An infra-red source. Someone on the ground had loosed a bracket of missiles from a Firechain station.

They knew where he was. He realised this, his mind crying out at the jolt its apparent immunity from attack and detection had been given, the sudden draining of confidence.

He could not believe it. The missiles had to be heat-seeking, homing on the exhaust gases of the sky's hottest point. Somehow he was visible to them. And he knew how. The Firechain station had to be using its infra-red equipment to search for the imprint of his exhaust. He was invisible on radar; on an infra-red screen, he would be revealed as a point of orange light. Radar immunity of something which yet gave off hot exhaust gases — it would have to be him. They would have been told that much on the ground. The removing of his immunity stunned him. He watched in paralysed fascination as the cluster of three glowing orange spots on his own screen enlarged as the missiles closed on the Firefox.

Seven SEARCH AND DESTROY

Contact time, seven seconds. The moment of Gant's stunned failure to respond passed. He pulled his gaze from the three orange spots on the screen. Also registering on the screen was the bright green blip of the Badger, now no more than a few short miles away and moving away below him now and to port. The single screen which constituted the detection 'eye' of the Firefox's electronics was built to register infra-red emissions of heat as orange spots, while radar images appeared as green blips. The missiles behind him were in the lower half of the screen, while the Badger ahead was in the upper half. He was still heading towards it, and it lay along the central ranging bar of the screen.

The Badger was the key to his safety, he realised. Here was a way he could misdirect the seeking missiles. He had to create a hotter spot than his own engines in the sky on to which they would home. He had to destroy the Badger, let it burn like a bonfire.

He pulled the Firefox onto a collision course with the Russian plane. He ignored, with every effort his mind could make, the three orange blips closing towards the centre of the screen. Contact time, five seconds. He pushed open the throttles; he had to be closer to the Badger before he loosed one of his own missiles. The anti-G suit tightened round him, then relaxed as it countered the increased pressure of his speed and dive. The three orange blips slipped across his screen, then centred again as they followed him. The green spot of the Badger enlarged. Gant flicked the 'Weapon Arming' switch on the console to his left. His thumb then flicked the switches to activate the thought-trigger and guidance systems. These switches safeguarded against the inadvertent firing and guiding of the weapons-system at any time. Gant could guide his missiles visually by direct observations of missile and target, or on the screen. What he saw with his eyes, and required the missile to perform, was converted in the brain into electrical impulses, detected by the electrodes in his helmet, and fed into the weapons-system which transmitted a steering signal to the missile. As the distance-to-target read-out indicated the optimum moment for a hit, the thought-guided system automatically launched one of the missiles under the wing. The missile left its bracket, then pulled up and away from the track he had been following. For a moment, light flicked at the corner of his eye as he caught the firing of its motor.

Three seconds to contact time. He began to hope. He saw the outline of the Badger clearly for a moment, directly ahead of him, an enlarging slim grey shape. He pulled the Firefox into a sudden turn to the right, away as acutely as possible from the Badger. Two seconds. On the screen the orange spot almost seemed to be merging with, overflying, the single green blip.

The Badger was in the centre of the screen: it was like a flower opening, a huge flower, orange, the hottest part of the sky as his own missile detonated. Contact time, zero seconds. The flower bloomed even brighter, just below the centre of the screen as he left the maelstrom behind — full bloom as the missiles detonated amid the inferno of the Badger's destruction.

He realised he was sweating freely inside the pressure-suit, and he felt a wave of relief, sharp as nausea, pass through him. Below him on the ground, the infra-red screens which had picked him up would now be confused, filled with light from the massive detonation. When it cleared, he would be out of range. He hoped they would draw the conclusion that he had himself perished in the explosion.

He checked his speed. Just below seven hundred mph. He could not go supersonic as he neared the coast. Too many trained ears, listening for the supersonic wake of his passage.

Now that he had survived, he began to take stock of the Firefox. The thought-guided weapons-system worked, as he had been certain it would. It had been Baranovich's project and, despite the fact that it was difficult to recall his face and the sound of his voice, as though a gulf of time separated them, there had been an unconscious, deep assurance that had been associated with the Russian Jew. He had seen only the tip of the iceberg. He had not needed to react at the speed of thought, but had had to make a conscious decision. But, when he had formed the thought, regarding the port wingtip missile, the advanced Anab-type of AAM, it had fired. All he had felt was the slight roll as the missile had detached itself.

He glanced again at the TFR. He was crossing the coastal strip. The mist that had clung to the coastal mountains had now become what he guessed must be a sea-fog — light, threatening to dissipate, but concealing. Best of all, it provided a sound-muffler, dispersing the noise of his engines so that a sound-trace such as the Russians were known to possess would be confused by echoes.

Then he saw the coast as an uneven line across the TFR screen. The narrow neck of sea formed the furthest inland penetration of the Gulf of Kara. His memory supplied the next set of coordinates as the Firefox passed out over the water, even as he pushed the nose down and lost more height, keeping within the slim belt of fog which slipped past the cabin, grey and formless, removing him from the world. The read-out supplied him with the required heading, and he obeyed the intertial navigator, turning onto the heading that would take him towards the twin islands of Novaya Zemlya, north-west of his present position.

He registered that the altimeter stated two hundred feet, checked the TFR, and eased back the throttles. The engine revolutions dropped, and he saw it register on the airspeed indicator. He levelled the aircraft, keeping it at a steady height of two hundred feet, and still eased back the throttles. While in the fog, he had the opportunity to conserve fuel, and thus make less engine noise. If he was heard, he wanted to sound as little like a fleeing thief as possible, and as much like an authorised search-plane as he could. At 250 mph, he steadied.

He reached up and his hand closed upon the transistor radio's innards, the special device developed for him at Farnborough, solely for the task which he now hoped it would perform. It was a homer pick-up, working on an incredibly complex pre-set pattern, searching for a beacon set on the same alternating pattern of signal frequencies. The signal remained on one frequency only long enough to be dismissed by anyone picking it up as static, or as unimportant. Gant could not tell, but the machine could, at what point it entered the sequence when switched on. The device had to be as complicated as it was because voice communication of any kind, however brief or cryptic, was open to being monitored by the Russians. He nicked the switch on the face of the apparently purposeless piece of hardware. Nothing, but at that moment he was unsurprised.

He knew the machine was searching the frequency band for a signal, and that there was a limit to its range when operational — yet he began to worry at the moment his hand flipped the switch. Only when the machine was functioning did he become truly aware of how much he depended upon it. Unless he picked up the signal transmitted by the refuelling craft, and unless his receiver coordinated with the transmitter to make the homing signal a continuous directional impulse, then he was lost, and he would run out of fuel somewhere over the Arctic Ocean and die.

The 'Deaf-Aid', as Aubrey had called it with one of the bastard's sardonic smiles, was required because no one, not even Buckholz, with Baranovich's inside knowledge, could be certain that the Russians might not be able to jam every transmitter and receiver aboard the Firefox when it was in the air — in which case Gant would never find the fuel he needed. Even if the Soviets could only track every transmitter and receiver, then Gant would lead them straight to 'Mother'.

And Gant thought, noticing that the sea fog was thinning, and that the oppressive greyness, the uniformity, of his visual world was lightening, they had not told him where to find 'Mother', just in case he got caught. What he himself did not know, lunatic though the logic was, he could not tell anyone, whatever they did to him.

He looked at the fuel-gauges. Less than a quarter full. He had no idea how far he had to go. If, and when, he picked up the signal, he would know he was no more than three hundred miles away from the refuel point. The Farnborough gimmick remained silent.

He had switched in the auto-pilot, coupled with the TFR. The longest part of his journey was beginning, the part of the journey to stretch the nerves, to test him as no other part of his mission had done — flying by faith, and a single box of tricks never operationally tested before. Guinea-pig. Pigeon. That was what he was.

Gant was an electronic pilot. He had relied on instruments all his flying life. Yet he had never depended on just one, one totally detached from his flying skill, one totally unaffected by anything he could do as the plane's pilot.

The featureless contours of the sea flowed across the TFR screen, endless, empty of vessels. He pushed up the plane's nose, rising above the still thinning fog, into the brief glare of sunlight and an impression of blue sky at four hundred feet. Nothing. He ducked the Fire-fox back into the mist. All his instruments told him that Novaya Zemlya was too far ahead to register yet, he had wanted the comfort of a visual check, as if his contemplation of his dependence upon a single piece of electronic hardware had made him revert to an earlier age of flying.

He looked again at the fuel-gauges. The refuelling point would be hundreds of miles beyond the Russian coastline, had to be, for safety. Less than a quarter full, the huge wing tanks, the skin of the fuselage itself that acted as a fuel tank.

Gant had no relish for the equation of fuel against distance, and again cursed his panic-dash for the Urals.

What had given him a sense of escape then, of life, might well have killed him.

'What is the matter, General Vladimirov?' the First Secretary asked conversationally. Vladimirov stopped in mid-stride and turned to face the Soviet leader. 'You must learn to accept success with more aplomb, my dear Vladimirov!' The First Secretary laughed.

Vladimirov smiled a wintry smile, and said: 'I wish I could be certain, First Secretary — much as I fear my mood must displease you, I am not certain…'

'You're not happy that we have lost the Mig-31?'

'No. I'm not happy that we have lost it — I wonder whether we could kill this man Gant quite so easily.'

'But it was your plan we followed, Vladimirov — you have doubts about it now?' Andropov asked from behind the First Secretary, a thin smile on his lips.

'I never was certain of its success, Chairman,' Vladimirov replied.

'Come,' the First Secretary said softly. 'What would make you happy, Vladimirov. I am in a generous mood.' The man smiled, broadly, beatifically.

'To continue, and intensify, the search for Gant.' Vladimirov's tone was blunt, direct.

'Why?'

'Because — if he's still alive, our self-congratulation might be just the help he needs. Find the refuelling aircraft, or ship, or whatever it is, that must be waiting for him.'

The First Secretary seemed to be looking into Vladimirov's mind as he debated the argument. After a long silence, he looked not at Vladimirov with his refocused gaze, but at Kutuzov.

'Well, Mihail Ilyich — what do you say?'

Kutuzov, his throat apparently rusty with disuse, said: 'I would agree to every precaution being taken, First Secretary.'

'Very well.' The First Secretary's bonhomie had disappeared, and he seemed displeased that the euphoric mood of the room that had existed since the report from Firechain One-24 had been dispelled. He was brusque, efficient, cold. 'What do you need, apart from the massive forces you have already called upon…?' There was an almost sinister emphasis on the word, and he left the sentence hanging uncomfortably in the air.

'Give me the Barents Sea map, and bleed in current naval dispositions in the area, together with trawler activity and Elint vessels,' Vladimirov called over his shoulder, standing himself squarely in front of the circular table, his hand plucking at his chin thoughtfully. The projection of the northern coastline of the USSR faded, taking with it the pricks of light that had been the Firechain stations and the 'Wolfpack' bases, and was replaced by a projection of the Barents Sea.

Vladimirov waited, as the map operator punched out his demands on the computer-console. Slowly, one by one, like stars winking in as dusk fell, lights began to appear on the map, the stations of ships in the Barents Sea and the southern Arctic Ocean. Vladimirov stared at them for a long time in silence.

'Where is the print-out?' he asked after a while. The map operator detached himself from his console, and handed Vladimirov a printed sheet of flimsy which registered the identification and exact last reported position and course of each of the dots on the projection glowing on the table. Vladimirov studied the sheet, glancing occasionally at the map.

North of Koluyev Island and west of Novaya Zemlya, the clustered dots of a trawler-fleet registered in white. The neutral colour signified their non-military purpose. They were a large and genuine fishing fleet. However, slightly apart from the close cluster were two deep-blue dots, which signified Elint vessels, spy trawlers, overfitted with the latest and most powerful aerial, surface and sub-surface detection equipment. They flanked the fishing fleet like sheepdogs but, as Vladimirov knew, their interest lay elsewhere. At that moment, they would be sweeping the skies with infrared detectors, checking traces with the search-pattern they would have received from the 'Wolfpack' sector commander the coast of whose area they were sailing. It was early in the year for Elint vessels to be operating in the Barents Sea, but Deputy Defence Minister, Admiral of the Soviet Fleet Gorshkov, liked his spy ships in action as soon in the Arctic year as was feasible. Because of the southward drift of the ice in the Arctic spring, at the moment they did little more than supplement the coastal radars.

Vladimirov's eye wandered north across the projection of the Barents Sea, picking up the scarlet dot of a naval vessel. From the list in front of him, he knew it was the helicopter and missile cruiser, 'Moskva' class, the Riga, and the pride of the Red Banner Northern Fleet: 18,000 tons displacement, armed with two surface-to-air missile-launchers, and two surface or antisubmarine launchers, four sixty-millimetre guns, mortars, four torpedo-tubes, and four hunter-killer helicopters of the Kamov Ka-25 type. She was proceeding at that moment on an easterly course, at the express command of the First Secretary, through Gorshkov in Leningrad, which would, within little more than an hour, bring her close to Novaya Zemlya.

Elsewhere on the living map, Vladimirov registered the presence of two missile-destroyers, smaller, less powerfully armed replicas of the missile-cruiser, without that ship's complement of helicopters. One of them was well to the north of Novaya Zemlya, near Franz Josef Land on the edge of the permanent ice-sheet, and the other was steaming rapidly south and east from the Spitzbergen area. The majority of the Red Banner fleet's surface vessels were in Kronstadt, the huge island naval base in the estuary of the Neva, near Leningrad; it was too early for operations, too early for exercises, in the Barents Sea.

There were, however, Vladimirov saw with some relief, a number of yellow dots glowing on the surface of the map, signifying the presence of Soviet submarines. He glanced down at the list, identifying the types available to him, mentally recalling their armament and then search-capability. Soviet naval policy in the Barents Sea was to keep the surface vessels in dock during the bitter winter months and during the early spring onslaught of the southward drift of the impermanent pack-ice, and to use a single weapon in the arsenal of the Red Banner Fleet for patrol duties — the huge submarine fleet at the disposal of the Kremlin and the Admiral of the Soviet Fleet. The policy explained why the Soviet Union had concentrated for so long, and so successfully, on the development of the Soviet submarine fleet, and why they had even returned to the commissioning of new, cheaper, conventional diesel-powered submarines, instead of an exclusive concentration, as had been U.S. policy, on the hideously expensive nuclear subs.

He ignored, for the moment, the three nuclear-powered 'V' type anti-submarine subs, and the two ballistic-missile subs returning to Kronstadt after then-routine strike-patrol along the eastern seaboard of the United States. They would be of no use to him. What he required were submarines with the requisite search-capability for spotting an aircraft, and for bringing it down.

'What are the reports of the search for wreckage of the plane?' he asked aloud at last, tired suddenly of the lights on the map. It was impossible for Gant to escape, and yet… he should already be dead.

'Nothing so far, sir — air-reconnaissance reports no indications of wreckage other than that of the Badger… the ground search parties have not yet arrived at the site of the crash.'

'Give me a report on the search for the refuelling-craft,' Vladimirov said in the wake of the report.

A second voice sang out: 'Negative, sir. No unidentified surface vessels or aircraft in the area the computer predicts to be the limit of the Mig's flight.'

Vladimirov looked angry, and puzzled. It was what he wanted to hear, from one point of view. No planes or ships of the West anywhere near the area. It was, frankly, impossible. There had to be a refuelling-point. But the nearest neutral or friendly territory had to be somewhere in Scandinavia. It was, of course, possible to suppose that Gant was scheduled to make another alteration of course, to head west and follow the Russian coastline to North Cape, or Finnish Lapland.

He did not believe it, even though he had taken the necessary precautions already. He believed that the CIA and the British SIS would not have been able to persuade any of the Scandinavian governments to risk what the landing of the Mig on their territory would mean, in their delicate relations with the Soviet Union on their doorsteps. No, the refuelling had to be out at sea, or at low altitude somehow. It could not be a carrier, there wasn't one in the area, not remotely in the area. Apart from which, the Mig-31 was not equipped for a deck landing. But could the base be an American weather-station on the permanent ice-sheet of the Pole?

Vladimirov disliked having to confront the problem of the refuelling. Until final confirmation that Gant had crossed the coast, and the evidence that there was no refuelling-station apparent, he had concentrated on stopping him over Soviet territory. But, now…

'Where is it?' he said aloud.

'Where is what?' the First Secretary asked. His face was creased with thought, with his approaching decision.

'The refuelling ship… or aircraft, whatever it is!' Vladimirov snapped in reply, without looking up from the map.

'Why?'

A thought struck Vladimirov. Without replying to the First Secretary, he said, over his shoulder: 'Any trace on infra-red or sound-detectors further west, either from Firechain bases, or from coastal patrols?'

There was a silence for a moment, and then the non-commital voice replied: 'Negative, sir. Nothing, except the staggered sector scramble in operation.'

'Nothing at all?' Vladimirov said with a kind of-desperation in his voice.

'No, sir. Completely negative.'

Vladimirov was at a loss. It was like staring at a jigsaw puzzle that didn't make sense, or a game of chess where unauthorised moves had been suddenly introduced, to leave him baffled and losing. He realised he had operated too rigidly as a tactician, and that the people who had planned the theft of the Mig had been experts in the unexpected — security men like Andropov. He glanced quickly in the Chairman's direction. He decided not to involve him. Realising that he was perhaps committing Kontarsky's crime, he decided to handle it himself.

There had to be an answer, but he could not see it. The more he thought about the problem of Gant's refuelling, the more he became convinced that it was the key to the problem.

But, how?

He glared at the map as though commanding it to give up its secrets. On it, every single light represented a Soviet vessel, except for a British trawler-fleet on the very edge of the map, in the Greenland Sea, west of Bear Island.

He wondered, and decided that it was too far. Gant would not have sufficient fuel to make it — and how did the British navy expect to conceal an aircraft carrier inside a trawler-fleet? The idea was ludicrous.

No. The map didn't hold the answer. It told him nothing.

His hand thumped the map, and the lights jiggled, faded and then strengthened. 'Where is he?' he said aloud.

After a moment, the First Secretary said: 'You are convinced that he is still alive?'

Vladimirov looked up, and nodded.

'Yes, First Secretary. I am.'

There its was, Aubrey thought, a single orange pin-head on the huge wall map. Mother One. An unarmed submarine, hiding beneath an ice-floe which was drifting slowly south in its normal spring perambulation, its torpedo room and forward crew's quarters flooded with precious paraffin to feed the greedy and empty tanks of Gant's plane.

He coughed. Curtin turned slowly round, then the spell that had seemed to hold them rigidly in front of the map was broken by the entry of Shelley, preceded by a food trolley. Aubrey smelt the aroma of coffee. With a start, he realised that he was hungry. Despite being envious of Shelley who was shaved and washed and had changed his shirt, Aubrey was not displeased by the sight of the covered dishes on the trolley.

'Breakfast, sir!' the younger man called out, his smile broadening as he watched his chief's surprise grow, and then become replaced by obvious pleasure. 'Bacon and eggs, I'm afraid,' he added to the Americans. 'I couldn't find anyone in the canteen who could make flapjacks or waffles!'

Curtin grinned at him, and said: 'Mr. Shelley — a real English breakfast is the first thing we Americans order when we book into one of your hotels!' Shelley, absurdly pleased with himself, Aubrey thought, was unable to grasp the irony of Curtin's remark. Not that it mattered.

'Thanks,' Buckholz said, lifting one of the covers. Aubrey deeply inhaled the aroma of fried bacon, left his chair and joined them at the trolley.

They ate in silence for a little time, then Aubrey said, his knife scraping butter onto a thin slice of toast, his voice full of a satisfied bonhomie: 'Tell me, Captain Curtin, what is the present condition of the ice-floe beneath which our fuel tanker is hiding?'

Curtin, eating with his fork alone in the American style, leaned an elbow on the table around which they sat, and replied: 'The latest report on the depth of the ice, and its surface condition, indicates all systems go for the landing, sir.'

Aubrey smiled at his excessive politeness, and said: 'You are sure of this?'

'Sir.' As he explained, his fork jabbed the air in emphasis. 'As you know, sir, all signals from Mother One come via the closest permanent weather-station, and are disguised to sound, if anyone picked them up, just like ordinary weather reports or ice-soundings. So we don't know what Frank Seerbacker in his ship really thinks, only what he sends. But the conditions are good, sir. The ice surface hasn't been changed or distorted by wind, and the floe still hasn't really begun to diminish in size — take it perhaps another three or four days to get south enough to begin melting.

'And — it's thick enough?' Aubrey persisted. Shelley smiled behind another mouthful of bacon and egg poised on his fork. He recognised the signs. Whenever Aubrey was at a loss in the matter of expertise, as he plainly was in the area of polar ice and its nature and behaviour, he repeated questions, sought firmer and firmer assurances from those who posed as experts.

'Sir,' Curtin nodded with unfailing courtesy. 'And it's long enough and wide enough,' he added, with the hint of a smile on his lips. 'Gant, if he's anything of a pilot, can land that bird on it.'

'And the weather?' Aubrey continued.

Buckholz looked up, grinned and said: 'What's the matter, Aubrey? Indigestion, or something?'

'And the weather?' Aubrey persisted, not looking at Buckholz.

'The weather is, at the moment, fine — sir,' Curtin informed him. He was silent for a moment, then he said: 'It's abnormally fine for the time of year, in that sort of latitude…'

'Abnormal?'

'Yes, sir. It could change — like that.' Curtin snapped the fingers of his disengaged hand.

'Will it?' Aubrey asked, his eyes narrowing, as if he suspected some massive joke at his expense. 'Will it?'

'I can't say, sir. Nothing large is showing up, not on the last batch of satellite pictures.'

'What of the reports from the submarine itself?'

'Nothing yet, sir. The weather's perfect. The sensors are being thrust up through the floe from the submarine's sail every hour, on the hour. The local weather's fine, sir — just fine.' Curtin ended with a visible shrug, as if to indicate that Aubrey had bled him dry, both of information and reassurance.

Aubrey seemed dissatisfied. He turned his attention to Buckholz.

'It's a lunatic scheme — you must admit that, Buckholz, eh?'

Buckholz glowered at him across his empty plate. He said: 'I'm admitting no such thing, Aubrey. It's my end of the business, this refuelling. You got him there, I admit that — a great piece of work, if that's what you want me to say — but I have to get him home, and you just better trust me, Aubrey, because I'm not about to change my plans because of your second thoughts.'

'My dear chap,' he said, spreading his hands on the table in front of him, 'nothing was further from my thoughts, I assure you.' He smiled disarmingly. 'I just — like to be in the picture, so to speak, just like to be in the picture. Nothing more.'

Buckholz seemed mollified. 'Sure, it's a crazy scheme landing a plane on a floating ice-floe, refuelling it from a submarine — I admit that. But it'll work, Aubrey. There's just no trace of that sub, not at the moment, because it's under the floe, and showing up on no sonar screen anywhere, except as part of the floe. It comes up out of the water, fills up the tanks, and our boy's away.' He smiled at Aubrey. 'We can't use disguises, not like you, Aubrey. Out there, on the sea, you can't disguise a ship to look like a pregnant seal!'

There was a moment of silence, and then Aubrey said: 'Very well, Buckholz. I accept your rationale for using this submarine. However, I shall be a great deal happier when the refuelling is over and done with.'

'Amen to that,' Buckholz said, pouring himself a cup of coffee from the percolator. 'Amen to that.'

Almost as soon as the last of the coastal fog vanished and the bitter grey surface of the Barents Sea was sliding beneath him, strangely unreflective of the pale blueness of the sky, Gant was on top of the trawler. He was travelling at a fraction more than 200 mph, idling by the standards of the Firefox, heading for the twin islands of Novaya Zemlya, his next visual coordinate checkpoint, and the trawler was suddenly almost directly beneath him. As he flashed over the deck, at a height of less than a hundred feet, he saw, in the briefest glimpse, a white upturned face. A man had been emptying slops over the side. Then the trawler was gone, become a point of green light on the radar screen and he cursed the fact that he had confidently switched off his forward-looking radar when he crossed the coast. Now, too late, he switched it on again. In the moment of success against the Badger, he had been careless, excited. In the moment he had glimpsed the white, upturned face, he had seen something else, something much more deadly. As if to confirm his sighting, the ECM register of radar activity indicated powerful emissions from a source directly behind him, and close. What he had the vicious bad luck to pass over was an Elint ship, a spy trawler. Even now, they could be following his flight-path on infra-red.

He pushed the stick forward and the nose of the Firefox dipped, and the grey, wrinkled sea lifted up at him, threateningly. He levelled off at fifty feet, knowing that, with luck, he was already out of electronic view, at his present height. The Elint ship's infra-red operators would have seen him disappear from their screens, even as they informed the captain of their trace, even as the man with the empty slop-bucket raced towards the bridge, mouth agape at what he had seen. They would have some kind of fix on him, a direction in which he had been travelling. He was heading for Novaya Zemlya — a blind man could pass that information back to whoever was coordinating the search for him.

He glanced at the fuel-gauge, and once more cursed the panic that had made him run for the Urals after visual sighting by the Soviet airliner north-west of Volgograd. If only…

He had no time, he realised, to concern himself with the futile. He could, he decided, do nothing except follow the course outlined, and to make the next, and final, course adjustment when he reached Novaya Zemlya.

His hand closed over the throttles. There were missile sites on Novaya Zemlya, abandoned as a testing-ground for Russia's nuclear weapons and now serving as the most northerly extension of the Russian DEW-line, and its first Firechain links. The Firefox was capable, he had proven, of Mach 2.6 at sea-level. How fast it could really travel he had no idea; he suspected at height its speed might well touch Mach 6, not the Mach 5 he had been briefed to expect. In excess of four-and-a-half thousand miles per hour. And perhaps two-point-two-thousand miles per hour at sea-level. The Firefox was a staggering warplane.

He pushed the throttles open. He had to use precious, diminishing fuel. Almost with anguish, he watched the Mach-counter slide upwards, clocking off the figures… Mach 1.3, 1.4, 1.5… The Firefox was a pelican, devouring itself.

The Firefox was nothing more than a blur towing a hideous booming noise in its wake to the spotters above the missile site at Matochkin Shar, at the south-eastern end of the narrow channel between the two long islands of Novala Zemlya. On the infra-red screens, he was a sudden blur of heat, nearing, then just as suddenly, a receding trace as he flashed through the channel at less than two hundred feet. Gant was flying by the autopilot and the TFR — if a ship was in the narrow channel, he would have no time to avoid it in the split-second between his sighting it and his collision with it; but the TFR would cope. His eyes were glued to his own screen, waiting for the glow that would tell him of missile-launch. None came.

As the cliffs of the channel, a grey curtain of unsubstantial rock, vanished and the sea opened out again, he felt a huge, shaking relief, and punched in the coordinates the Firefox was to fly. Automatically, the aircraft swung onto its new course and, slowly, he eased off the throttles, claiming manual control of the aircraft again, desperate to halt the madness of his fuel consumption.

As the aircraft slowed to a sub-sonic speed, like the return of sanity after a fever, Gant realised why no missiles had been launched in his wake. Any missile launched at a target at his height might well have simply driven itself into the opposite cliff, without ever aligning itself on a course to pursue him.

Now he was flying on a north-westerly course, a course which would eventually, long after his fuel ran out, take him into the polar ice-pack at a point between Spitzbergen and Franz Josef Land. Long before he reached it, he would be dead. The bitter grey sea flowed beneath him like a carpet, looking almost solid. The sky above him was pale blue, deceptively empty.

The loneliness ate at him, ravenous. He shivered. The 'Deaf Aid' gave him no comfort. It remained silent. He began to wonder whether it worked. He began to wonder whether there was something, somebody, up ahead of him, waiting to refuel the Firefox. The screen was empty, the sky above empty, the sea devoid of vessels. The Firefox moved on, over a flowing, grey desert, eating the last reserves of its fuel.

The report from the Elint ship, followed by the confirmatory information from Matochkin Shar had angered the First Secrtary. It was suddenly as if he had accepted Vladimirov's doubts and precautions purely in the nature of a academic exercise; now he knew that they had been necessary, that Gant had not been destroyed in the explosion of the Badger.

It was perhaps the fact that he had been taken in that caused him to be so furiously angry that he turned on Vladimirov, and berated him, in a voice high, gasping with anger, for not having destroyed the Mig-31.

When his anger had subsided, and he had returned shaking and silent to his chair before the Arctic map on the circular table, Vladimirov at last spoke. His voice was subdued, chastened. He had been badly frightened by the outburst of the First Secretary. Vladimirov now knew he was playing with his own future, professional and personal. Gant had to die. It was as simple, and as difficult, as that.

He moved swiftly now, without fuss, without consultation with the First Secretary or with Marshal Kutuzov; the former appeared to have relapsed into silence, and the latter, the old airman, appeared embarrassed and shaken by the politician's outburst against a military man trying to attain the near-impossible.

Vladimirov briefly studied the map on the table's glowing surface. If Grant's course had been accurately charted after he left Novaya Zemlya, then he was heading, though he could not yet know it, directly towards the missile-cruiser, the Riga, and her two attendant hunter-killer submarines. Out of that fact, if it was a fact, he could manufacture another trap.

Swiftly, he ordered search planes into the area of permanent pack towards which Gant was heading to make a possible landfall. It was possible to stop Gant. His finger unconsciously tapped the map at the point which registered as the present location of the Riga. At that moment, her two attendant protectors, the missile-carrying, diesel-powered 'F' class anti-submarine submarines, were still submerged. Because of the importance of their role in protecting the missile-cruiser, they had been adapted to carry sub-surface-to-air missiles, to supplement the hideous fire-power of the Riga against aerial attack.

'Instruct the Riga to hold her present position,' he called out, 'and inform her two escorts to surface immediately.'

'Sir,' the code-operator replied, confirming the order.

'Send a general alert to all ships of the Red Banner Fleet,' he said. 'Prepare them for an alteration of Gant's suspected course. Give them that course.'

'Sir.'

'What is the prediction on Gant's fuel supply?' he said.

Another voice answered him promptly. 'The computer predicts less than two hundred miles left, sir.'

'How accurate is that forecast?'

'An error factor of thirty per cent, sir — no more.'

This meant that Gant might have fuel for another hundred and forty miles, or for nearly three hundred. Vladimirov rubbed his chin. Even the most generous estimate would leave him well short of the polar-pack. He ignored the inference, behaving as Buckholz's advisers had predicted. Vladimirov, since the days of his flying, had become a cautious man, unimaginative: daring by the standards of the Soviet high command, in reality safe, unimaginative. He could not make the mental jump required. If Gant's fuel would not last him to the pack, then the inference was that he would crash into the sea. There could not be another answer. He checked.

'Any unidentified aerial activity in the area?'

'None, sir. Still clear.'

'Very well.' He returned to his contemplation of the map. Gant would not take the aircraft up, not now, without fuel to make use of its speed. Therefore, as he had been doing when sighted, he would be travelling as close to the surface of the sea as he could. That meant, with luck, visual fire-control from the cruiser, at close range. Otherwise, there would be need to depend on infra-red weapons-aiming, which was not the most efficient of the fire-control systems aboard the Riga. However, it would do. It would have to do…

A voice interrupted his train of thought. 'Report from the Tower, Sir — Major Tsernik. PP2 is ready for take-off, sir.'

Vladimirov's head turned in the direction of the voice, then, as his gaze returned to the map, he saw the First Secretary staring at him. He realised that something was expected of him, but he could not immediately understand what it was. There was no need to despatch the second Mig, not now, with Gant more than three thousand miles away, and running out of fuel. He was not going to be able to refuel now, therefore the intercept role designed for the second plane was irrelevant.

'Who is the pilot?' the First Secretary asked bluntly.

'I–I don't believe I know his…' Vladimirov said, surprised at the question.

'Tretsov,' Kutuzov whispered. 'Major Alexander Tretsov.'

'Good. I realise there is little time, but I will speak with him before he takes off.' The First Secretary appeared to be on the point of rising.

Vladimirov realised, with a flash, that the First Secretary expected him to order the second prototype to take off and to pursue, at maximum speed, the wake of the first.

Vladimirov knew it would take Tretsov less than an hour to reach Novaya Zemlya on Gant's trail. As far he was concerned, it was a waste of time. He looked at the First Secretary.

'Of course, First Secretary,' he said politically, judging the man's mood correctly. The First Secretary nodded in satisfaction. With an inward relief, Vladimirov called over his shoulder: 'Summon Major Tretsov at once. And tell the Tower and inform all forces to stand by for take-off of the second Mig within the next few minutes.'

The refuelling planes would need to be alerted. At a point somewhere on the coast west of Gant's crossing point, the Mig-31 would be refuelled in the air from a tanker. He ordered the alert. He realised that he had to play the farce to its conclusion. It would be impolitic, more than that, to voice his feeling that Gant was not going to reach his fuel supply, or that he was confident that the Riga would bring him down.

The latter, he knew, would be a very unwise thing to say, at this juncture.

He looked down at the map again. There was nothing more to do. Now, it was up to the Riga, and her attendant submarines. It was most certainly not, he thought, up to Tretsov baring off into the blue in pursuit.

There was still no signal from the 'Deaf Aid'. Gant's fuel-gauge registered in the red, and he was flying on what he presumed was the last of the reserve supply. He had switched in the reserve tanks minutes before. He had no idea of their capacity, but he knew he was dead anyway unless he heard the signal from his fuel supply within the next couple of minutes, and unless that signal was being transmitted from close at hand.

The sea was empty. The radar told him the sky was empty of aircraft. He was dead, merely moving through the stages of decomposition while still breathing. That was all.

It occurred to Gant that Buckholz's refuelling point had ben an aircraft, one that had attempted to sneak in under the DEW-line — one that had been picked up, challenged, and destroyed. There had been a refuelling tanker, but it no longer existed.

He did not think of death, not in its probable actuality, drowning, freezing to death, at the same time as the plane slid beneath the wrinkled waves. Despite what one of Buckholz's experts had described as a tenuous hold on life, Gant was reluctant to die. It was not, he discovered, necessary to have a great deal to live for to be utterly opposed to dying. Death was still a word not a reality — but the word was growing in his mind, in letters of fire.

The radar screen registered the presence ahead of a surface vessel of large proportions. Even as he moved automatically to take evasive action, and his mind moved more slowly than his arm to question the necessity of such action, the screen revealed two more blips, one on either side of the surface vessel. He knew what he was looking at. Nothing less than a missile cruiser would merit an escort of two submarines. He was moving directly on a contact-course towards them.

The read-off gave him a time of one minute at his present speed to the target. He grinned behind his face-mask at the word that formed in his mind. Target. A missile cruiser. He, Gant, was the target. No doubt, the ship's infra-red had already spotted him, closed his height and range, tracked his course and fed the information into the fire-control computer. There was, already, no effective evasive action he could take.

If he was to die, he thought, then he wanted to see what the Firefox could really do. He made no conscious decision to commit suicide by remaining on his present course. He would have been incapable of understanding what he was doing in the light of self-immolation. He was a flyer, and the enemy target was ahead of him — a minute ahead.

It was then that the 'Deaf-Aid' shrieked at him. He was frozen in his couch. He could not look at the visual read-out on the face of the 'Deaf-Aid'. He did not want to know by how little he had missed, how little the time was between living and dying. The missile cruiser and the submarines closed on the radar screen even as he watched them. Distance to target read-out was thirty seconds. Because of his near zero height, he had been on top of them before he knew. Now it was too late.

The 'Deaf-Aid' signal was a continuous, maddening noise in his headset, like a frantic cry, a blinding light. He stared ahead of him, waiting for the visual contact with the missile cruiser, waiting to die.

Eight MOTHER ONE

It could have been no more than a fraction of a second, that pause between fear and activity, that tiny void of time before the training that had become instinct flooded in to occupy the blank depth of his defeat, his numb, stunned emptiness. Nevertheless, in that fraction of time, Gant might have broken — the resolution of despair, suddenly shattered by the clamour of the homing signal, and the read-out which told him that the distance was less than one hundred and forty-six miles to his refuelling point, to fuel and life — but he did not break. The huge blow to his system was somehow absorbed by some quality of personality that Buckholz or his psychologists at Langley must have recognised in his dossier, must have assumed to be still present in him. Perhaps it had only been the assumption by Buckholz that an empty man cannot break.

There was a fierce thrill that ran through him. A cold anger. A restrained, violent delight. He was going against the Russian missile cruiser. He clung to that idea.

Swiftly, coolly, he analysed the situation. The homing device indicated that the source of the signal-emission, whatever it was, lay in an almost-direct line beyond the cruiser. His fuel-gauge told him he could not take avoiding action. The shortest distance between two points… and he was looking for the shortest distance. He had to. He had to commit himself. Even if he wanted to live — and he realised, with a cold surprise, as if suddenly finding something he had lost for years, that he did want to live — he still had to go against the missile cruiser and its horrendous firepower. Now that there was no alternative, it was the path to life and not to death, and the thought gave him a grim satisfaction.

Radar analysis indicated that the two submarines were approximately three miles to port and starboard of the cruiser, providing a sonar and weapons screen for the big ship. Now they had surfaced, and would be training their own infra-red systems in his direction. If he remained at zero feet, they would be on his horizon, making an accurate fix by their fire-control difficult — with luck, he would have only the cruiser to worry about. The submarine closest to him, depending on which side he passed the cruiser, would not dare to loose off infra-red missiles in close proximity to the cruiser and its huge turbines.

Swiftly he analysed the capability of the cruiser's weapons against the Firefox. At his speed, any visual weapon control was out of the question. The torpedo-tubes were for submarines only, as were the mortars, four in twin mountings. The hunter-killer helicopters might be in the air, but they might not have yet been armed with air-to-air weapons to do him any damage — though they were there, he acknowledged, and their fire control was linked into the central ECM control aboard the cruiser. The guns, 60 mm mounted forward of the bridge, would be controlled by the same electronic computerised fire-control system, linked to the search radar, which operated also in infra-red. Yet they were not important. At speed, at zero feet, they could, in all probability, not be sufficiently depressed to bear on him if he flew close enough to the ship.

He stripped the cruiser of its armaments, one by one. There was one only left — the four surface-to-air missile launchers of the advanced SA-N-3 type. Neither the surface-to-surface, nor the anti-sub missiles, had any terrors for him. But the SA missiles would be infrared, heat-seeking, armed and ready to go.

He remembered the Rearward Defence Pod and prayed that it would work. The SA missile twin-launchers were located forward of the bridge superstructure, leaving the fattened, widened aft quarter of the ship for the four Kamov helicopters. Hoping to present the smallest target possible to him, the ship would be directly head-on to his course. There was no time now for any attack on the cruiser itself. Gant abandoned the idea without regret of any kind. He was part of the machine he flew, now, cold, calculating, printing-out the information recovered from his memory of his briefing.

He wondered how good the cruiser captain's briefing had been. Had he been told of the tail-unit, of the armament of the Firefox, or its speed? He assumed not. The Soviet passion for secrecy, for operating the most compartmentalised security service in the world, would operate like a vast inertia, the inertia of sheer habit, against the Red Navy officer being told more than was necessary. He would have received an order — stop the unidentified aircraft by any means possible.

The read-out gave the time-to-target as twenty-one seconds, distance to target as two point two miles. Soon, within seconds, he would see the low shape ahead of him. It was the Firefox against the… He wished he knew the name of the cruiser.

A long, low ice-floe slipped beneath the belly of the Firefox, dazzlingry white against the bitter, unreflecting grey of the Barents Sea. He had passed over other floes during the past few minutes, the southernmost harbingers of the spring drift of the impermanent pack. Then he saw the cruiser, a low shape on the edge of the horizon which neared with frightening rapidity. He felt that moment of tension, as the adrenalin pumped into his system, and the heart hammered at the blood, the precursor of action.

He wondered whether the cruiser would wait like a complacent animal, to swallow him in its fire, or whether it would launch a brace of missiles while he was still more than a mile away. Infra-red was imprecise — technology had been unable to narrow the inevitable spread of a heat-source as it registered on the screen. It was not a good way to obtain an accurate fix. Nevertheless, fire-control aboard the cruiser, using infra-red missiles, did not need to be precise.

He knew he was now visible to the men on the bridge, a grey petrel seemingly suspended just above the surface of the icy water. He watched the screen, waiting for the sudden bloom of missile-exhausts to emerge from the bulk of the cruiser. At the moment of launch, any SA missile would show up as a bright orange pinprick.

On the radar screen, he picked up what he guessed was one of the cruiser's Kamov helicopters, and his ECM read-out calculated height and range. He decided to launch one of his own AA missiles as a diversion, let the electronic adrenalin of the information flood the cruiser's fire-control computer, let the physical diversion of a hit on the chopper add another dimension to the chessboard across which he moved towards the cruiser.

He launched. The missile pulled away, and whisked up and out of his view. He watched it tracking across the screen, homing on the helicopter which, he knew, would have picked up the missile, and would be scuttling to take avoiding action. Gant bared his teeth behind his facemask. The eletronic war that was all he had ever known thrilled him to the bone, every nerve and muscle fulfilled. War was reduced to a game of chess, to an elaboration upon elaboration of move and counter-move. And he was the best.

The deck of the cruiser bloomed with pale fire, brighter spots on the screen. They had waited, anticipating that he would pull away from the threat of the submarines and the helicopters. Yet he had maintained the same course, heading directly towards them. The fire-control on the bridge, as he had hoped, had been triggered by his own attack upon the Kamov — the helicopter burst into flames in the sky above him, but he saw it only peripherally as a sudden orange flower, petals falling…

They had wanted to drive him between the cruiser and one of the submarines, expected him to pull up and away from them. But he had kept coming at them. Whatever the Soviet captain knew or did not know, he would have been told of the perilous estimate of the Firefox's fuel supply. That would have driven him to action. The Soviet captain had jumped the gun, triggered by Gant into a reflex action.

The ship was only hundreds of yards ahead of him as the SA missiles leapt from the twin-launcher forward of the bridge. Gant pulled away, sliding with exposed underbelly to port, to pass the cruiser. On the screen in front of him, he saw the missiles deviate from their original track, to close on him with frightening speed. Then, at his silent command as he reached the optimum moment, the thought-guided weapons-system triggered the tail-unit. Behind him, suddenly, there was an incandescent flare that paled the sun. He shoved the throttles forward, and the Firefox leapt across the water like a spun stone, skipping the tops of the wrinkled waves, the bows of the cruiser looming above the cockpit in one brief, momentary glance, and then he could see nothing but the grey water as he passed no more than fifty yards from the ship's plates.

Behind him, the tail-unit, releasing a heat-source which, for four seconds burned far hotter than his two Turmansky turbo-jets at low speed, attracted the pair of heat-seeking missiles, and the ball of fire on the screen brightened until it seemed to hurt his eyes, even behind his tinted facemask. Then the bloom died suddenly. On the screen, the cruiser was more than a mile behind him as he went supersonic.

His fuel-gauge registered empty. The Mach-counter showed him steadied at Mach 1.6. The altimeter showed him skipping over the sea at less than fifty feet, still, he hoped, out of sight of the submarines and their infra-red, though by now they would have a transmitted bearing and range from the cruiser.

He watched the screen, saw the two patches of dull orange from the exhausts of a second pair of SA infrared missiles overhauling him. The Soviet captain had been premature. He had been waiting for the better target, the optimum moment, but the trick of the tail-unit must have taken him by surprise. However, he had responded by ordering the release of two more missiles — and…

Gant saw the patch of light at the port edge of the screen as another two remotely launched SA missiles from the submarine nearest to him began to converge on his exhaust.

He checked the read-out on the 'Deaf Aid'. The bearing of the transmitter remained dead ahead of his present course, right on the last course he had fed into the aircraft after leaving the Novaya Zemlya channel. The distance was still one hundred and sixteen miles to its location. The homing signal began to clamour at his brain in the silent aftermath of the split seconds of violent action. He knew it was imperative to slow down.

Easing the throttles back he slowed, so that on the screen the four distant dots of dull orange seemed to draw swiftly nearer. The tail-unit had worked. Gant knew he was gambling, but this time he had an alternative, whereas before he had had none. He could attempt to outrun the pursuing missiles until his fuel ran out.

It was a curious sensation of helplessness, with not even a button to press, as his only link with reality seemed to be the four closing points of orange light. He felt, since he was not looking up from the screen, as if he were a still, helpless point, a kind of sacrifice. He could feel the sweat beneath his arms, running down his sides, chill inside the pressure-suit. He knew that under the weight of the grip he was exerting on the throttles, his hand was shaking fiercely. He waited.

He threw the throttles forward, and the Firefox leapt like a startled animal, flew like a terrified bird. The tail-unit released again and the explosion was almost instantaneous, huge and audible; then the shock-wave rocked the Firefox and he fought to steady the plane. It was like an extra thrust of engine-power. Quickly, he eased back the throttles and the speed dropped to below 170 knots once more.

He ignored the fuel-gauge. His eyes turned to the 'Deaf Aid' his whole attention being to the noise of the homing signal. Less than a hundred miles. In the sudden, almost sexual release after his escape from the coordinated missiles from cruiser and submarine, he didn't see how he could make it.

Ice-floes, larger, more frequent now, passed beneath the belly of the Firefox as he headed north.

The First Secretary's conversation was brief, and to the point. He wasted no time on an appeal to Major Alexander Tretsov's loyalty as a Russian and as a member of the party, or on specious inspiration. Rather, he used the other weapon which had become synonymous with his name — fear. He told Tretsov what was at stake, and he impressed upon him the price of failure. Tretsov was to head northwards, at top speed, using the phenomenal power of the Mig-31, and to rendezvous with a tanker-aircraft over the northern coastline of Russia. From there, he would head for the current position of the Riga, from which vessel there had, as yet, been no report; here another tanker would be waiting in the event that he required a further refueling. The tankers were already on route to their contact co-ordinates.

Tretsov had been visibly nervous of the weight being thrust upon his shoulders. For a senior test pilot in the Red Air Force, he was young, in his early thirties, and he looked younger than that. Vladimirov had felt for him as the whole crushing weight of the First Secretary's personality acted upon him, and the silent presence of Andropov struck coldly. Yet he was good, his record was a fine one, Vladimirov was forced to admit. Whether, in the unlikely event of his being able to locate Gant, he was good enough to destroy the American, was another matter. Vladimirov was almost sorry for Tretsov that he was to be put to the test. He was technically the junior test pilot on the Bilyarsk project, and had flown fewer hours than his senior, Voskov — but Voskov was dead, killed by Gant. The KGB had found his body in the locker. Rather grotesquely, it had fallen comically out of the locker like a mummy from a sarcophagus.

The atmosphere in the War Command Centre after the departure of the chastened, grim-mouthed Tretsov was, for the First Secretary, more congenial. The exercise of power, and the gratifying obedience tinged with fear that had shown itself in the pilot's eyes, soothed him, reinforced his sense of the overwhelming odds ranged against Gant, the American who had dared… The First Secretary felt his anger rising again, and fought to calm himself. The second Mig-31, cleansed of the foam sprayed on it following the attempted sabotage, and armed to the teeth with AA missiles and cannon-shells, sat at the end of the main runway, waiting for the final clearance from the Tower. In moments, it would pass close to the First Secretary's Tupolev. The Soviet leader positioned himself at one of the small portholes let into the room to observe the take-off.

For Vladimir, the situation was neither so simple, nor so gratifying. For flie Commandant of 'Wolfpack', the period of the conversation of the First Secretary with the almost silent Tretsov had been a period of anxiety. The First Secretary appeared to wish to ignore the minutes ticking away, the time approaching of Gant's expected interception with the course of the missile cruiser and her two subs. The Soviet leader listened, perhaps, to other voices, in other rooms. But Vladimirov knew that the cruiser had to stop, Gant, that it was the last chance; last, because he still didn't know how Gant expected to refuel, but knew that he must. He churned the possibilities in his mind, in an attempt of his own to ignore the clock with its red second-hand sliding round the face.

Carrier… carrier-sub… polar-pack… aircraft… ditch, to be collected by sub?

None of them made any sense. It was almost impossible for a sub to hide itself in the Barents Sea and he had nothing but a wild theory that the Americans could have produced a carrier-sub, especially since the Mig was not adapted for a carrier-landing of any kind. No, it had to be an aircraft. And there wasn't one. Unpalatable though it was, it was the truth. There was no unidentified aircraft in the area, nor likely to be at the time one would be required by Gant.

He considered the possibility of Gant ditching the Mig at sea, hoping for collection by a submarine. The plane would be submerged, and could then be towed behind the submarine back to wherever the CIA had arranged. It was fantastic, but it might be made to work. The plane would be damaged by sea water, but the Americans would learn sufficient from it to remove the Mig-31 completely as a threat to air superiority.

Yet there was no submarine in the area either, and no surface vessel capable of reaching Gant's last position for hours.

Which meant it had to be the polar-pack. Gant must be hoping to use the last of his fuel in as steep a climb as he could muster, and to glide the remainder of the way. It was a desperate idea, but no more desperate than sending one man in the first place to take on the KGB, in order to get out of Moscow and arrive at Bilyarsk. And Gant had done that at the bidding of his masters — why not this? The theory was that an aircraft like the Mig could gain perhaps as much as two miles in a glide for every thousand feet it climbed. Gant could climb high enough, if he had the fuel, to glide to the edge of the permanent pack.

He was on the point of requesting the puzzle be fed to the computer for analysis when he heard the voice of the code-operator. The computer-conceived code in which the message had been transmitted from the Riga had been broken down and it was this that the operator read from his print-out.

'Sir,' he said. 'Message from the Riga …' It was as if the operator were unwilling to proceed with it, feeling the attention of the room drawn to him in an instant.

'What is it?' Vladimirov snapped.

'Contact made with unidentified aircraft. Missiles fired, infra-red type, from cruiser in two groups of two, and from submarine escort in one group of two…'

'Well?'

'The aircraft appeared to be carrying some kind of drone tail-unit which detached and ignited.' There was a pause, then: 'The Mig-31, sir, wasn't destroyed as far as they can tell. It was already over all radar horizons before the contact time of the missiles, but the captain is not prepared to verify positive contact.' The code-operator looked directly at Vladirnirov. 'He would like clarification of the type and capability of the aircraft that he attempted to destroy, sir.'

Vladimirov's head spun round, so that his eyes stared into the grey, slatey surfaces of those of the Soviet leader. The words of challenge and contempt which were rising to his lips died in his mind. He said nothing. The face that confronted him was implacable, and all the righteous indignation that O.C. 'Wolfpack' felt was squashed, buried. He could not throw his career away, not so lightly as that, in heaping his recriminations upon the First Secretary. Instead, he snapped at the code-operator.

'Secrecy must be maintained. Thank him for the job he — attempted to do, and order him to stand by for further instructions.'

'Sir!'

The keys of the encoding-console clicked almost at once. The disguised mimicry of the First Secretary's maxim concerning security was the furthest Vladirnirov felt he could allow himself to go. The recognition made him ashamed. Then he dismissed the feeling.

'What do you intend to do now, Vladimirov?' the First Secretary asked him, his mouth a straight line, his eyes completely without expression. In that face, in that moment, Vladimirov saw the truth of power in the Soviet Union, saw the heart of the cadres and coteries that were contained within the Kremlin. Because the First Secretary was able to put the blame for failure upon others, then the failure itself was no longer important. If Vladimirov were dismissed, disgraced for the loss of Mig-31, that would be all that would matter. This man before him cared nothing for the realities of the situation, only for the personal politics of his own survival.

Vladimirov was sickened, rather than frightened. With selflessness in extremity taught as one of the virtues of the military caste to which his family had belonged for generations, he gave no thought to his own survival or success. Yet the Mig-31 must not be lost to the Americans,' thrown away.

'I–I shall order all available units into the area of the Riga, First Secretary,' he managed to say in a level voice, from which he carefully excluded any trace of anger, or bitterness.

'And — what will they do?' Andropov asked with contempt.

Kutuzov came to his rescue. Perhaps he, too, had been sickened by what he had silently witnessed in the War Command Centre, or perhaps he sensed the tension in Vladimirov and intended to help save his career for him. Whatever, the old man's bravery as he spoke with contempt to the Chairman of the Committee for State Security made Vladimirov warm towards him.

'They, as you put it, Chairman, will make every effort to recover the Mig-31 that your poor security in Moscow and at Bilyarsk allowed to be successfully stolen by one man — one single American!' The whisper from the ruined throat carried clearly to every ear in the room, the tone of the voice imprinting itself on every consciousness. The Chairman of the KGB flushed, two points of colour on the parchment-toned skin over the cheek bones. The smile, cynical and aloof, disappeared from his face.

Vladimirov transferred his gaze to the First Secretary's face. The Soviet leader appeared disconcerted, as if reminded of painful realities. He said, as if somehow to make amends without actual apology:

'Mihail Ilyich — I know that you will do all you can. But — what is it that you propose to do, with the whole of the Red Banner Northern Fleet and most of "Wolf-pack", northern sector, at your disposal?' The voice was calm, almost gentle — mollifying.

Kutuzov turned his gaze to Vladimirov, nodded, as if at some secret understanding, and then Vladimirov said: 'The first priority, First Secretary, is to order the take-off of the Mig.' The First Secretary turned back to the small window, as if prompted by the calculated priority the O.C. 'Wolfpack' had placed on his own pet surmise.

'Of course,' he said. 'Pass the order to the Tower.' The order was transmitted by one of the radio-operators. Still keeping his gaze on the runway through the window, he said: 'And — next?'

Vladimirov looked down at the map in front of him, revealing the bright, isolated points of light in the wastes of the Barents Sea, north to the permanent pack.

'Order the Riga and her submarine escorts to alter course, and head north in the wake of the Mig at all possible speed.'

Over the clicks of the encoding-console, Vladimirov heard the First Secretary mutter: 'Good.' Already it appeared, the man's huge complacency was returning. Vladimirov had noted it often before, in his dealings with those who governed his country, the anodyne that could be found in action.

He looked down at the map, ignoring the broad back of the First Secretary in the grey suit, the fabric stretched across the powerful shoulders; Were he a less elevated individual, he thought, it might be possible to draw comfort from that rigid stance, that overbearing impression of strength.

'Scramble the Polar Search squadrons immediately,' he ordered. He watched the leonine head nod in approval, saw the shoulders settle comfortably. Surface craft, he thought. 'Order the missile destroyers Otlitnyi and Slavny to proceed with all possible speed to the predicted landfall of the Mig on the permanent pack.

'Sir.'

'The three "V"-type submarines to proceed at once on courses to the same landfall reference.'

'Sir.'

Vladimirov paused. Faintly through the fuselage of the Tupolev, he heard the whine of engines running up. The Mig, cleared from the Tower, was preparing for take-off. He did not cross to the tiny window as he heard the engines increase in volume as the Mig raced down the runway. Instead, he watched the shoulders of the First Secretary and the slight, hopeful tilt of the head. There was a blur from the runway beyond the window, and then the unmistakable sound of a jet aircraft pulling away from the field in a steep climb. For a moment, the First Secretary remained at the window, as if deep in contemplation, then he turned back into the room, and Vladimirov noticed the slight smile on his face.

The distance to the transmitter of the homing-signal still crying from the 'Deaf Aid' registered as ninety-two miles. The fuel-gauges registered empty. Gant was flying on little more than fresh air, and he knew it. It was time — and it might already be too late — to go into a zoom climb and begin the long glide to the contact-point with the refuelling-tanker.

The more he considered the problem, the more Gant became convinced that such a glide was his only chance. He had to go as high as possible, and then hope that he would leave himself enough fuel for the tricky and delicate task of matching speeds with the tanker-aircraft, and coupling to the fuel-umbilical trailing behind the tanker. Not once had he considered that the tanker might be some kind of surface craft. It could not be a carrier — the USN would not dare put a huge and vulnerable target like that into the Barents Sea. Unlike Vladimirov, he knew that the Americans had developed no carrier-sub.

Therefore, he was going to have to refuel in the air. He knew the Firefox's predecessor, the Mig-25 Foxbat, had established an absolute altitude record of almost 119,000 feet, and that the Firefox was intended as being capable of a greater performance. And, in the present atmospheric conditions, at two-and-a-half miles for every thousand feet of height, he could easily reach the tanker, if he could only pull the Firefox up to an altitude of perhaps forty or more thousand feet.

Yet he had to take a terrible risk. He still had to have plenty of height when he made the rendezvous, and sufficient fuel left for the final manoeuvres.

The fuel-tanks of the Firefox had to be almost empty — had to be, he told himself. It was one aspect of the aircraft with which he was not familiar. Though he had asked Baranovich, the electronics engineer had been unable to help him.

The engines, at his crawling speed across the grey, ice-littered sea, still operated without hesitation. Yet he could take no further risk. The automatic emergency tanks must have cut in by that time, and he had no idea of the extra range they would give him but he suspected it wouldn't be sufficient to take him to the contact-point.

He pushed the throttles forward, and pulled back on the column. The nose of the Firefox lifted and he accelerated, watching the altimeter begin to climb, steadily at first, and then more and more rapidly as he increased the thrust of the two huge turbojets. He seemed not to breathe, not once during the minute-and-a-half of climb. The pale, spring blue of the sky began to deepen as he climbed.

He levelled out at sixty-two thousand feet, throttling back the engines until there was just sufficient power to maintain the function of the generators. At that height, he would be at about twenty-seven thousand feet when he arrived at the tanker's location. It would be enough. He checked the screen. Nothing.

There was only one thing to hope — that it remained as clean of activity as it was at that moment.

The bearing of the signal remained dead ahead of him. The distance read-out gave him eighty-eight miles to target. He still wondered how much fuel remained, and the thought nagged at him. He began to think that he might have overplayed the safety margin, with regard to his zoom climb. It must have drained the emergency tanks.

Ahead of him, far ahead, he saw the grey heaviness of cloud building up. The screen remained empty of activity. The Firefox glided silently through an empty sky, the dark blue canopy of the thin upper layers of the atmosphere above, the tiny, silent greyness of the northern limits of the Barents Sea below. Ahead of him, far ahead, beyond where the cloud seemed to be building, there was an edge of whiteness in sight — the polar-pack.

United States Navy Captain Frank Delano Seerbacker lay on his cramped bunk in his cramped quarters aboard the USS Pequod, a nuclear-powered 'Sturgeon' class submarine, as it drifted beneath the ice-floe whose southward path it had imitated for the past five days. Seerbacker's submarine had passed beneath the polar-pack near the western coast of Greenland and, rigged for silent running, had slithered out into the Barents Sea after fourteen days at sea.

The journey had possessed three distinct phases for the captain, his officers and the crew. There had been the top-speed dash from the submarine's concealed base on the Connecticut coast, then the claustrophobic passage beneath the polar ice — and since then, the captain thought again with irritation, they had been drifting without engines, averaging three-point-one miles a day beneath the floe.

The Pequod was unarmed, another fact which Seerbacker bitterly resented. The submarine's torpedo room and forward crew's quarters were flooded with high-octane paraffin, fuel for the super-plane that the CIA was stealing for the good old U.S. of A.

Seerbacker's craggy, lined face creased in a frown of contempt. His long nose flared. He disliked, he decided, the CIA — especially when that crud organisation told him to sit under a damn ice-floe and wait for a super jet to land on it!

He stirred on his cot, raising his knees merely for the sake of altering the position of his limbs. His hands were behind his head, and he was staring sightlessly at the ceiling. He and his men were sick, he decided, of the whole monotonous routine of the mission; sick to death, following the ice-floe's unvarying, snail-like course southward.

It wasn't, he thought grimly, as if they'd even had the change of routine involved in looking for a suitable floe. The floe — the so-called runway, he thought with contempt — had been selected from the study of hundreds of satellite photographs, in the first instance, the findings of which had been checked and confirmed by a Lockheed Orion which had collected both photographs and visual findings. Proven satistical data from oceanographic surveys allowed experts at Langley to make a firm prediction about the floe's ability to take the weight of the Firefox. Seerbacker had merely been told where to find it. He realised he was being merely bloody-minded in cursing the domination of machinery, but he went on doing so anyway. There was after all, he told himself, damn all else to do except to curse the temporal powers and their crazy ideas, who had got him into this mess, who had messed up his boat with their paraffin!

There was a soft knock at his door.

'What?' he said, irritated rather than thankful at being roused from his fruitless reverie. A crewman handed him a sheaf of flimsy. On it, in the hand of his Exec., who was acting as weather-officer, he read the information that he had been expecting, but which was doubly unwelcome when it came. The temperature of the air above the floe was dropping much too rapidly. Cloud was building up in the area, cloud that would mask from Gant the position and dimensions of the floe.

Seerbacker tossed his head at the information. It was his bloody luck, just his godawful luck! He disissed the crewman. He needed no further information. If there was anything else, then the Exec, would send it to him. He had no need to go to the control room, not yet. He cursed again the constant trimming of the tanks, the regular, futile checks to be made on the paraffin that flooded the tubes and the forward quarters, and on the weather, the surface temperature of the floe, the condition of the ice surface… It was, he decided, no job for a man with twenty years in the service, and with one of the best crews in the Navy.

He considered the information concerning the air temperature. It was dropping rapidly, which could, and probably would, mean a change in the weather conditions which had been unusually settled and mild for those latitudes and the time of year. The change, when it came, could so easily become freezing fog, localised in then area, spreading perhaps as little as a few square miles. In freezing fog, Seerbacker did not have to know anything about aircraft and pilots to know that there was no way Gant could land on the floe. They had no navigational aids aboard that could help him, allow him to make an automatic landing — nothing except the transmitter that would tell Gant where they were. Already, as the message had told him, there was a local build-up of cloud. Perhaps Gant might not be able to get down, even in that…

The introduction of doubt prompted his mind to review the emergency procedures. In the final event, he was to avoid capture at all costs. It could never be admitted by Washington that a submarine of the U.S. Navy had been a part of the scheme to steal the Firefox — he was to destroy the Pequod, if necessary, to prevent its capture by the Russians.

His mind winced away from the secret orders he had opened at sea; if Gant failed to land on the floe, or if he crashed onto the ice, or into the sea in the vicinity of the Pequod, then he was to make every effort to rescue the pilot — and an even greater effort to capture the plane, and tow it home beneath the icepack. The havoc that would cause with his crew, and his navigation, he was not prepared to consider. It was, he knew, theoretically feasible, but he hoped that none of this would be necessary and that Gant was good enough to set the Firefox down like a feather.

The trouble was, Seerbacker admitted to himself finally — Gant was late. He had been briefed as to the performance and range of the Firefox, and the ETA for the plane over the floe had already passed — was minutes past. And with that plane, he knew, minutes were really huge gaps of time — a big enough gap for a man's death. He would not know whether Gant had even stolen the plane until it appeared, or failed to appear, on the submarine's infra-red. Up through the ice was thrust a single metal spike, camouflaged in white, carrying the transmitter of the homing-signal tuned to Gant's 'Deaf Aid', the complex changing signal that he should be picking up. It was his one and only link with the American pilot.

Seerbacker cursed the British designer for not including a facility, built-in, so that Gant could identify himself — but it was strictly one-way. The Pequod transmitted, and the Firefox received — at least, until the aircraft was close enough for the transponder in the homing device to emit an identification signal, and that distance was within visual range anyway. As his Exec. had commented — if General Dynamics had fitted it as standard equipment in 'Sturgeon' class subs, it would dispense Coca-Cola, along with doing the laundry and playing canned music. Seerbacker's lips twisted in a reflective smile.

When Gant appeared over the floe, the frequency of the signal he received would change, and he would hear the equivalent of an instantaneous echo, as on sonar. Then no doubt, to his appalled mind it would become clear that he would have to land on an ice-floe — in cloud, Seerbacker added vitriolically, perhaps in freezing fog. This would probably mean scraping the pilot off the ice, sinking the remains of the plane, and towing it thousands of miles back to Connecticut. It didn't bear thinking about.

Gant was late. The thought nagged at him. Minutes only — but late. His fuel must be shot to hell by now, Seerbacker thought savagely. Must be. He thought about going down to the control-room, almost swung his long, thin legs off the cot, and then decided against it. After five days, he couldn't start showing a yellow flag as soon as the guy was a couple of minutes overdue. He reflected that there was very little aerial activity in the area — even if that lack of activity included Gant.

There was no comfort to be found, he decided. None at all…

Surprisingly, it was Buckholz, massive, self-confident, almost silent Buckholz, who cracked first. Aubrey had been aware of the tension rising in the room as the morning wore on, after Shelley had cleared the breakfast remains, and they had finished with the coffee. Then, suddenly, there had been nothing to do. The tension in the room had been palpable, lifting the hair at the nape of the neck like static electricity. A profound silence bad descended on the five occupants, broken only by the creaking of the stepladder whenever Curtin ascended or descended, pinning his satellite weather photographs to the wall, or altering and supplementing the coloured pins in the map of the Barents Sea.

Buckholz had ceased to take notice of the map. For more than half an hour he had not looked once in its direction. It was as if he were listening to some inner voice, seeing some mental image, and did not need the confirmation of pictures and pins.

Aubrey knew why he was silent, grim-faced, tense. He shared that tension because he, too, understood how perilous Gant's fuel state must be. The last report from the Pequod, from Mother One and Seerbacker, was a routine weather report which contained no coded reference to sighting Gant by infra-red and contained, moreover, some discouraging news concerning the weather in the area of the floe, news that would make it difficult for Gant to land. Aubrey did not want his neat, carefully conceived, methodically executed operation to end with the humiliation of a crash-landing on the floe, and the ignominy of a Firefox damaged and affected by the corrosive sea-water from being towed home behind the Pequod.

But, it was the fuel state that worried him, more than the weather. To Buckholz, Aubrey guessed, it signified that Gant had already failed. Aubrey glanced up at the clock, and then again at Buckholz. It was the wrong thing to do, he realised, to remind Buckholz of what he had evidently forgotten but, nevertheless, he said, his voice carefully deferential:

'Is it not time we released the decoy submarine into the arena, Buckholz?'

There was a moment of silence, then Buckholz, his lips working, snapped: 'What in hell's name for?' His eyes glared at Aubrey, as if the latter had interrupted some kind of ritual, solemn and awful, proceeding within the American.

Aubrey spread his arms. 'It is time, by the clock,' he said blandly.

'Why waste it?' Buckholz asked.

'What?'

'The decoy — decoy for what, man?' Buckholz seemed to half-rise from his seat, as if to browbeat the small, rotund Aubrey.

'We don't know he's lost…' Aubrey began.

'What in the hell was all that coded stuff we picked up, between Bilyarsk and the Riga, then?' Buckholz snapped. 'They got him, Aubrey — blew the ass from under him!'

Aubrey tried to retain a smile of encouragement on his face, and said: 'I don't know — it could have meant they didn't get him.'

There was a silence. Buckholz seemed to sink back into his chair. Anders, standing behind him, a plastic cup clutched in his big hand, looked down at Buckholz's cropped head, then looked across the room at Aubrey. His gaze seemed quizzical. Aubrey nodded, and mouthed the single word: 'Decoy.' Anders crossed to a telephone in the corner, dialled a number, and spoke. Hearing his voice, Buckholz turned incuriously to watch him, then glanced across at Aubrey, and shook his head.

Buckholz had returned to his sightless contemplation of the papers in front of him. By the time Anders had completed his telephone call to an operations room in the MOD which would alert the decoy submarine at that moment lying to the west of Spitzbergen and the decoy aircraft waiting to take off from Greenland, or already in the air to the east of that frozen land-mass.

Aubrey nodded to Anders in acknowledgement of his call, then proceeded to gaze across the room at the map. The decoy planes would be picked up by Russian landborne and seaborne radar within minutes, and be seen to be heading towards the vicinity of North Cape, while the submarine would entice Russian surface vessels and submarines to investigate, drawing them away from the Pequod while she was on the surface, refuelling the Firefox.

A doubt suddenly struck him, cold in the pit of his stomach, clutching with a hot, burning sensation in his chest, like indigestion or a heart murmur. Would the Pequod ever need to surface? Looking again at Buckholz, it was evident that he didn't think so. Aubrey rubbed his smooth, cherubic cheeks, and wondered.

At twenty-two thousand feet, the Firefox dropped into the top of the cloud-stack that Gant had watched inexorably approaching. The silent, gliding aircraft slid through the ruffled, innocuous edges of the cloud, into the grey silence, with the helplessness of a stone. He had been unable to estimate the depth of the stack — it could, he knew, reach down to the surface of the pewter-coloured sea. He was four minutes to target, descending at a steady rate of three-and-a-half thousand feet per minute, moving ahead at 180 knots, three miles a minute. When he reached the target location, he would still be eight thousand feet above sea-level. It would have to be enough. There was nothing on the screen. Only the TFR reflected the monotonous pattern of ice-floes slipping past him, below the cloud.

There was nothing that looked remotely like a ship, anywhere within the limits of the target area. There was no aircraft. There was merely the incessant, monotonous signal, emanating from some unknown source, beckoning.

In the cloud, Gant felt cold. The signal was his only contact with reality, and yet it seemed to possess no other reality than that of sound. He was unable to believe in its physical source. Gant had always been an electronic pilot, always relied on instruments. Stories older men told him, of flying bombers over Germany in the last days of the last war, were tales that might have come from ancient Greece — mythological. Therefore, he did not panic, was not really afraid. The signal did have a source, however distant, however ghostly. It was no illusion. He trusted it.

Nevertheless, it began, subtly but certainly, to feel cold in the cabin of the Firefox, a chill, arctic cold, salt like the sea.

Seerbacker was swinging his legs off the bunk even as his Exec. - who in his excitement had come in person — peered round the door to his quarters and said, almost breathless with sudden, renewed tension: 'Aircraft contact, sir — heading this way.'

'Range?' Seerbacker snapped, tugging his cap on his head, and pressing past the younger man, who followed his captain's rapid progress towards the control-room.

'Less than four miles, sir — height about twelve thousand — she's on the bearing, sir. And there's no radar contact, only a very faint infra-red. She's either on lowest power or not using her engines at all.'

Without looking behind him, Seerbacker said: 'Then it's him.' Then he added: 'What's the surface temperature of the floe?'

'Still dropping, sir. Dewpoint's still a couple of degrees away'.

Seerbacker suddenly stopped, and turned on his Exec. 'A couple of degrees?' he repeated.

'Yes, sir.'

'Wind?'

'Five to ten knots, variable.'

'Insufficient turbulence, then?' he said mysteriously, and the younger man, Lt. Commander Dick Fleischer, nodded, understanding his drift. 'But, what about his turbulence, when he comes into land — uh? What happens then?'

'It shouldn't…' the younger man began.

'With this old tub's luck, Dick — what d'you think will happen? He'll put the wheels down, stick back — and phut! The lights'll go out!' He tried to smile, but the effect was unconvincing. Both he and Fleischer knew that, however he said it, the content of his statement was deadly serious. Two degrees drop in the temperature would mean that the air above the surface of the floe would achieve dewpoint, that point on the scale where freezing fog would begin to form. The effect of the turbulence of the Firefox attempting to land could trigger the drop in temperature.

Seerbacker, as if prompted by his own lurid imaginings, clattered off down the companion-way. As soon as he thrust his thin, lanky form into the control-room of the sub, he said:

'Where is he?'

'Three miles — a little over eleven thousand feet, sir!' the radar-operator sang out.

'Is he still on the same bearing?'

'Sir.'

'Can he see the floe?'

'Yes, sir. Cloudbase is thirteen-and-one-half thousand.'

'Then let's surprise him, gentlemen,' Seerbacker said with a grim smile. 'Blow all tanks — hit it!'

The floe was the only thing down there that Gant really saw. He had dropped out of the cloud at thirteen thousand feet, only three minutes or a little more away from the target — and there it was. Big, perhaps two miles north-south, and almost the same across. It lay directly in his path. On the radar-screen, there was no craft of any kind. Yet the target lay less than six miles ahead of him. That floe was the right distance away. Only its distance from him had made him regard it at all.

He knew it had to be the floe. For a long time he had suspected that he had never been intended to reach the polar-pack, nor had he ever been intended to rendezvous with a tanker-aircraft — that would have been too risky, too dangerous by half. It had to be the floe — and a landing. His eyes searched ahead, saw nothing. For a moment, then, he felt close to panic. A flat floe, like a dirty white water-lily on the surface of the bitter Arctic water. It was surrounded by others, smaller for the most part. There was no sign of life! He felt the bile of fear at the back of his throat, and his mind refused to function, analyse the information — then it happened. The signal changed, the homing-signal began to emit a broken, bleeping call, two to the second. He recognised its similarity to a sonar-contact, instantaneous echo. Even as the seconds passed, the bleep became more and more insistent, urgent. He was closing on the target. He studied, the condition of the sea, estimating the windspeed again — yes, five to ten knots, no more. Even before his questions had been answered, even before the shock of the changing signal had dispersed, he began the routines required if he were to land on the floe. The last of the ice-crystals starred on the windscreen dispersed under the effects of the de-mister. Again, more urgently now, he studied the surface of the floe, but only a small part of him was looking for signs of life. Principally he looked at the flatness, the length of possible runways, looked for markings, judged the direction of the wind.

When it came, it came with the sudden shock of freezing water, or a physical blow. At the western edge of the floe, away to port, and still ahead of him, the ice buckled, curled at the edge before cracking. The reinforced sail of a nuclear submarine came into view, and Gant saw the bulk of the ship beneath; ice spun away from it, sliding from its hull.

A bright orange balloon was released from the sail, and then an orange streamer of smoke which spurted vertically before the wind tugged it flat downwind of the submarine. Gant knew as soon as he saw the emerging sail that he was looking at an American submarine.

Automatically, he checked the radar. Negative. He eased on power, felt the aircraft shove forward, and dropped the nose. As he touched on the air-brakes, and stabilised his speed at 260 knots, the smoke was passing beneath his wingtip. He noticed, with almost idle curiosity, that the sonar-like pinging of the homing device had changed to a continuous signal — instantaneous echo. The target was below him, a submarine of paraffin; it would be a matter of less than an hour before he was refuelled, and ready to take off. He hauled the aircraft to the left, in a rate one turn that would line him up in the direction of the wind-flattened smoke from the sail.

The wind direction was such that he would land along the north-south axis of the floe, which gave him almost two miles of snow-covered ice in which to stop. He knew the snow, unless it was utterly frozen, would act as an efficient braking-sytsem — it would be, he told himself with a grim smile, the relief at finding the sub still warming him, like landing on a carrier — something else he had learned to do in Vietnam.

He dropped the undercarriage, and the lights glowed, registered the wheels 'locked'. He slowed his speed to 220 knots, and levelled the wings. The floe was ahead, with the dark cigar of the submarine embedded in it, a lizard half-emerged from its shell, its streamer of orange smoke in line with his course.

He checked back on the stick, and read his altitude as one thousand feet. He dropped his speed to 180 knots, and stabilised there. His rate of descent was now 350 feet per minute. The grey, wrinkled waves, seemed to speed up, to reach up at him hungrily. He eased back the throttles, and the speed dropped to 175 knots. He was almost dazzled now by the glare of the ice-floe, yet through the dazzle, the surface still looked good.

He chopped the throttles, and the Firefox suddenly seemed to sag tiredly in the air, began to sink. He checked back on the stick into the flare-out position. On full flap, the Firefox seemed to drop for a moment, then the plane jolted viciously as the wheels bit into the surface snow, and the nose-wheel slammed down. Visibility disappeared for a moment as the snow spewed around the nose, and it was a second or more before the de-mister coped. The forward screen cleared. Even as Gant wondered whether the engine would flame out because of snow in the air-intakes, he saw that his visibility had disappeared. He was rushing across a surface of ice and snow, enveloped in a thick, rolling grey fog.

Nine PRESSURE

Gant understood what had happened — dewpoint; the formation of a thick, rolling blanket of fog along his rushing track had been almost instantaneous. The knowledge did not lessen the rising unease he felt, could not counteract the explosion of adrenalin in his system. The engines had not flamed out, and the snow flung up around the cockpit by the nose-wheel had slid from the screen — yet he could see nothing. He was helpless — the snow on the surface of the floe was slowing the aircraft as swiftly as any reverse thrust from the engines and yet he was slipping across an ice surface, down the north-south axis of a floe, towards the icy grey waters of the Barents Sea. If the size of the floe were too small, inadequate, if he had miscalculated.

The Firefox slowed to walking pace, trundling more unevenly now, jolted by the indentations and scabs of the surface ice beneath the thin blanket of snow. And the fog was already thinning, as the turbulence of his passage became less; it was spreading, thinning to a grey, damp mist. He looked over his shoulder, shifting in the couch for perhaps the first time in an hour. He could not see the orange balloon, nor could he see the line of the streamer of smoke, which would give him some indication of the direction of the sub. He turned the aircraft to port, through one hundred and eighty degrees, and taxied back up the line of his landing, crawling forward, his eyes searching for figures moving in the mist, lights or signals which might direct him. He felt the unease and the adrenalin drain from him. He was down.

He thought he saw a lumping, shapeless figure moving to port of him, but could not be sure. The mist seemed to have thickened again. The figure had not been carrying a light. He pressed the button, and raised the cockpit cover. The sudden change of temperature as the heated air of the cabin rushed out and was replaced by the Arctic air above the floe seemed to knife through the protection of the anti-G suit as if it had been made of thin summerweight cotton. He was chilled to the bone in a moment, his teeth chattering uncontrollably behind the tinted facemask of his flying helmet. His hands on the controls seemed to tremble, as if registering the groundshock of an explosion. He unlocked the helmet and tugged it up and away from his head. His cropped head seemed to prickle with a cold fire. Ignoring the noise of his teeth, he craned his head, listening and looking in the direction from which he had glimpsed the figure in the mist.

He thought, twice, in swift succession, that he heard voices away to his left, that he was paralleling the path of men searching for him — but he couldn't be certain. The voices, like the cries of alien birds, seemed to distort in the thick mist, and he couldn't be sure of the direction from which they came. Then he realised that the men would be heading to what they would have assumed was the point of his halt, behind him now — they would not, perhaps, have expected him automatically to make a 180 degree turn, and cover his tracks.

Then he saw a dull glow, lighting a misshapen, lumbering figure, a lamp held low in a swinging hand. He heard his own name being called, loudly, yet seeming faint, unsubstantial. He did not reply, and the figure called again. Gant felt a curious reluctance to speak, despite the cold, despite the sudden, rushing sense of loneliness, of the interminable time of his journey from Bilyarsk — and before that, from London. The voice was American. He smiled, in spite of his detachment — that was it, he recognised, it was detachment he felt, a sense of removal from this figure cautiously approaching. It was so, so ordinary, a lumping shadow with a New York accent — nothing really to do with him, and the Firefox, and what he had done.

He shrugged off the feeling. The wind gusted to perhaps twelve knots, and the blast of it struck him in the face, reviving him to the present, to his physical cold and discomfort. He raised his hand to his face, cupped it and yelled. His own voice sounded thin, almost unreal. 'Over here — the plane's over here, man!'

'That you, Gant?' the voice replied. Gant realised only as he began to cast about that his own eyesight was vastly superior to that of the figure to his left. He turned the Firefox in the mist, very slowly, and saw the figure straighten, and become certain of his whereabouts. 'Jesus — I must need glasses, for Chrissake!' the figure said.

Gant had no need to apply the brakes; slowed by the surface snow, the aircraft rolled to a halt. The great turbojets made only an impatient murmur behind him. He could hear the figure, which now seemed tall and thin, only given a tent-like shape by the parka it was wearing, talking into an R/T handset.

'O.K., you men — I found him. Get over here, on the double!' Then the figure moved forward. A mittened hand slapped against the fuselage and Gant, leaning out of the cockpit, stared down into an ascetic, lined face. He could see the gold leafing on the peak of a Navy cap beneath the fur trimming of the parka hood. Gant smiled, foolishly, feeling there was nothing to say. A great wave of relief surged in him, almost nauseous, and he began to shiver with emotion rather than the cold.

'Hi, fella,' Seerbacker said.

'Hi,' Gant said, in a choking voice. He saw other figures moving in the mist, and the round globes, furred and dim, of lamps.

'Hey, skipper — you want us to line up now?' a voice called.

Seerbacker, seemingly distracted from a perusal of Gant's features, turned his head, and yelled over his shoulder. 'Yeah — let's get this bird over to his mother — it's dying of thirst!' He turned back to Gant, and added, in a low voice: 'You don't look like anything special, mister — but I guess you must be — uh?'

'Right now — you're pretty special yourself, Captain!' Gant said.

Seerbacker nodded, and lifted the handset to his face. He said:

'O.K. this is the captain. Call it for me.'

He listened intently as men began to call in, as at a roll-call. When there was a silence once more, he looked at Gant, and said: 'I've got half of my crew standing on this goddam ice, mister, in two nice straight lines, all the way to the ship. Think you can ride down the middle?'

'Like the freeway,' Gant said.

'Seerbacker raised his hand, gripped the spring-loaded hand and toe holds and hoisted himself clear of the ground.

'Mind if I hitch a ride?'

'They're pretty rough on freeloaders on this railroad.'

'I'll take my chances,' Seerbacker said with a grin. 'O.K., let's roll.'

Gant eased off the brakes, and the Firefox slid forward. He saw the first two men, then: lights haloed, bright, and then other lights, a tunnel in the mist. He straightened the nose down the centre of the tunnel, and the lights began to roll slowly past on either side, only just visible in the mist. He heard Seerbacker giving an order.

'O.K., you guys, move in, dammit! This bird won't bite — it's one of ours, for Chrissake!'

The lights ahead wobbled, narrowed, became brighter, more helpful to him.

'Thanks,' he said to the invisible Seerbacker below him.

'O.K., mister. They're only here to help — even if they don't like it.' There was an edge to his voice as he ended his sentence. Gant sensed, beneath the surface, the resentment that had emerged along with relief at his arrival — the resentment of men stuck in the middle of an enemy sea for day after day, tracking the drifting floe.

'I'm sorry,' he said, involuntarily.

'What?' Seerbacker began, then added: 'Oh, yeah. It's just orders, mister — don't give a mind to it.' Gant saw a long low shape, sail atop, ahead of him through the mist. There she is,' Seerbacker said unnecessarily, and Gant felt the pride in his voice. It was the pride of a commanding officer in his ship.

'Yeah — I see it,' he said.

'Pull up alongside,' Seerbacker said. 'You want to eat in the car, or come on inside?' Gant swung the Firefox parallel with the fattened cigar of the ship, half-buried in ice, like something reptilian emerging from a white shell. He cut the motors, and the plane died. In the absolute silence of the next moment, Gant felt a fierce affection for the aircraft. It was not something he had stolen, a freight for the CIA — it was what had brought him from the heart of Russia, helped him to escape, taken on a missile-cruiser, taken on… Seerbacker interrupted the flood of his fierce, cold, mechanical love for another machine.

'Welcome to "Joe's Diner". The cabaret isn't much good, but the hamburgers are a delight to the weary traveller! Step down, Mister Gant — step down, and welcome.'

Gant unstrapped himself from the webbing of the couch. As he stood up, his muscles and joints protested as he moved. The wind seemed to gust at him, the freezing cold from the Pole search through his suit, eat at him. He shuddered.

'Thanks,' he said. 'Thanks.' He stepped out of the cockpit, no longer reluctant, down onto the ice.

'Call them out,' Vladimirov said. 'A report from every Polar Search Squadron now!'

It took four minutes for the report to be completed, time which the First Secretary seemed not to consider wasted, wherever Gant was, and whatever he was doing. Vladimirov loathed the political game that was being played and in which he had joined, his silence giving assent, his cowardice dictating his silence. When the last search-plane had reported on its findings in its designated area, it was clear that there had been no attempt by the Americans to establish any kind of fuel-dump on the ice, no attempt to mark out or clear any kind of runway. Vladimirov, his belief shaken but not destroyed, felt his bemusement hum in his head like a maddening insect. He had the answer, somewhere at the back of his mind, he was sure of it…!

The cold eyes of the First Secretary, and the glint of the strip-light on Andropov's glasses, made him bury his reflections.

'Now,' the Soviet leader said, 'order all available units into the North Cape area — everything you have!'

Vladimirov nodded.

'Scramble "Wolfpack" squadrons in the North Cape sector through to Archangelsk sector,' he snapped. 'Staggered Sector Scramble for all units.' He did not glance at the map-table, did not ask for the map to be changed. He was oblivious to it, seeing in his mind with absolute clarity, the dispositions of all surface, sub-surface and aerial units that might be employed.

'Order the Otlintnyi and the Slavny to alter course at once for North Cape — order them to proceed at utmost speed.'

'Sir!'

'Order all submarines on the Barents Sea map to alter course, and to proceed to the Cape area at top speed.'

'Sir!'

'Order the Riga to alter course, together with her escorts, and to put up her helicopters at once — they are to proceed at top speed to the Cape.'

'Sir!'

It was futile, he knew — the bellowing challenge of a coward after the bully is out of earshot, the simulated fury of the defeated. Yet he became caught up in its frenetic, useless energy. He was intoxicated by the power he possessed.

Like a child he had once seen building on the sands at Odessa a long time ago, he made himself oblivious to the sea of truth creeping up behind him, and threw all his energies into the task of making his fragile, impermanent structure of sand. He flung everything into the air, changed the course of every surface and sub-surface vessel in the Barents Sea.

The map on the table was now showing the western sector of the Barents Sea — its operator had bled in the map reflecting Vladimirov's countless orders. Vladimirov realised he was sweating. His legs suddenly weak, unable to support him any longer. He lowered himself into a chair, looked up and found the First Secretary smiling complacently at him.

'Well, my dear Vladimirov — that wasn't so bad, after all — eh?' He laughed. Behind him, like an echo, Andropov smiled thinly. Vladimirov shook his head, smiled foolishly, like a rewarded child. 'You seem to enjoy it — eh? Power… you understand, eh?' The man was leaning towards him. Vladimirov could do nothing but continue grinning foolishly, and nod his head.

A voice cut into his vacuous confrontation with the Soviet leader. 'Tretsov reports the Mig-31 crossing the coast on the line of longitude 50 degrees, near Indiga.'

It was like a single stone dropping into the flat silence of a pond. All of them around that table were suddenly reminded of the awesome potentiality, the enormous power, of the thing that had been stolen. It was little more than twenty-five minutes since Tretsov had taken off. The coast was approximately 1250 miles due north from Bilyarsk, and the Mig-31 had already reached it, passed over it, heading for its rendezvous over the Barents Sea with a tanker aircraft.

Vladimirov looked at the first Secretary, saw the momentary hesitation in the eyes.

'Shall I order Tretsov to alter course, First Secretary?' he asked tiredly.

The big man shook his head, still smiling. 'Not for the moment — let Tretsov make his rendezvous with the tanker first. When we have a sighting, we will point him like an arrow at the American — eh, like an arrow, Vladinurov?'

The First Secretary laughed. Vladinurov derived no comfort from the sound, from the over-confidence it betrayed.

Twenty minutes after he had landed, Gant was back on the surface of the floe, checking the progress of the refuelling. Despite the bitter, freezing cold, the raw wind that swirled the thick mist around him, whipped the smoking breath away from his numbed lips, Gant stood on the ice near the Firefox, as if unwilling to surrender the aircraft entirely to the attentions of Seerbacker's crew. The frost had already begun to rime the fur of his borrowed parka, which did not seem to warm him, and he stood, a hunched figure, his hands thrust into his pockets, staring into the grey, formless world of the floe, seeing shadowy, labouring figures on the ice. The two hoses, each four inches in diameter, snaked across the floe towards the plane. The crew worked like men at the scene of some desperate, frozen fire. A trolley-pump had been wheeled out across the ice, having been lowered from the forward hatch by a winch, and then a smaller hatch in the forward deck had been opened. Gant's nostrils had been assailed by the sudden, bitter-sweet smell of the paraffin. A heavy-duty hose disappeared into the hatch above the forward crew's quarters.

It would take, Gant knew, perhaps another twenty minutes to refuel. Unlike the huge pressure-pumps available at an airbase in the front line, which could transfer as much as three thousand gallons of paraffin a minute to the thirsty tanks of a warplane, this trolley-pump was an aged, short-breathed thing.

There had been a delay, while Gant devoured a plate of chili in Seerbacker's quarters, before the pump had begun to operate. The bonding wire running from the sub, which was required to earth the Firefox to prevent the danger of a spark from the static electricity in the fuselage igniting any spillage, had been too short. The sub's crew had spliced in another length of wire, and the huge crocodile clip had been fastened to the nose-wheel strut Only then had the refuelling begun.

When the two civilians carried by the Pequod — an engineer and an electronics expert — had begun work on the plane, Gant agreed to return to Seerbacker's cabin.

Once there, he sat in silence except when, after looking at his watch, he murmured, 'Ten minutes.'

A minute or two later, there was a knock at the door. 'Yeah?'

The Exec., Fleischer, stuck his head into the room. 'Weather report, sir,' he said.

Gant suddenly seemed to come awake. His eyes fixed on Fleischer's face, the intensity of the gaze making the young man falter.

'What is it?' Gant said.

'The wind's getting up, sir — gusting to fifteen knots at times.' Fleischer spoke to Seerbacker, quite deliberately. 'The fog seems to be lifting.'

Seerbacker nodded. Gant had relaxed. Fifteen-knot gusts were no real threat to take-off.

'What about the shore-party?'

'Almost through, sir — another seven or eight minutes, by Peck's reckoning.' Seerbacker nodded. Peck, the Pequod's chief engineer, would not be much out in his reckoning. He would have bullied the men into utmost effort, whatever his private considerations concerning Gant and the safety of the ship.

Fleischer withdrew his head, and Gant made to rise from his chair. The next thing he knew was the huge jolt of the deck moving beneath him, and he was flung head-first across the table. He had a brief glimpse of Seerbacker catapulting off his bunk, and then his left shoulder struck the bulkhead with a jarring blow. The ship's lights winked out, and then returned, glowing brightly again. He felt the numbness of his shoulder and side, and the weight of Seerbacker's body lying winded across his chest. He heard a clatter from the companion-way, presumably Fleischer's body being thrown to the ground. He shifted his body, and saw Seerbacker's stunned, frightened face staring up at him.

'What in hell's name…?' he said, his voice small, choking.

'What was it?' Gant said.

Seerbacker struggled to his feet, ungainly, bruised. Blood seeped from the corner of his mouth. He had bitten his tongue. He wiped the blood from his face, and stared at his reddened fingers for a moment. Then he seemed galvanised into action by the sound of running feet outside. He heaved open the door.

'What the hell's going on, sailor?' he bawled.

Gant picked himself off the floor, rubbing his shoulder. Feeling was returning to it, and he reckoned that nothing was dislocated or broken.

'Sir — we don't know.'

'What? Then what the hell are you doing here, sailor? Find out!'

'Sir!' The man's footsteps retreated down the com-panionway.

'The Firefox!' Gant said.

'The hell with that!' Seerbacker exploded. 'What about my boat?'

Gant followed him out of the cabin. Fleischer was leaning against the bulkhead, blood oozing from a deep, livid gash on his forehead. Seerbacker ignored him, dazed as he was, and pressed past him towards the control room. Gant stopped briefly to examine the wound, then he patted the young man on the shoulder, and followed in the captain's wake.

The control room gave a confused impression of men picking themselves up, of furniture overturned. Gant headed towards the hatch-ladder up to the bridge.

'Get me a damage report — and quick!' barked the captain.

The freezing air bit through Gant's parka, and the wind plucked his first raw breath away from him. From the top of the sail, he could see the Firefox in the improved visibility, apparently undamaged. The men who had been working on the ice were scattered, one or two still prone, obviously injured, other men bending over them, others spreading out over the ice.

Gant yelled down to a sailor near the submarine:

'What happened?'

The man looked up, saw the captain standing alongside Gant.

'Don't know, sir. We — heard this cracking sound, like a scream, and then I was trying to push my face into the floe. I thought it was a fish homing on the boat, sir!'

'It was no torpedo. Where's Mr. Peck?'

'He headed off that way, sir,' the sailor replied, pointing due north across the floe.

Gant strained his eyes, but the mist still clung to the floe in patches, and visibility was no more than a hundred yards at best. He stared in the direction of Peck's disappearance, and there was an unstable yet formless apprehension watery in his stomach. As the minutes passed, the wind, stronger now it seemed, gusted occasionally into his face, making his eyes water. And he began to be afraid.

Then he saw Peck's figure emerging from the mist. As if prompted by something in his mind, or as if Peck's appearance heralded an answer, he began to run towards the Chief Engineer.

'What is it?' he asked breathlessly, reaching the big man. 'What's wrong?'

Peck looked down at him, and said simply: 'Pressure ridge.'

'What?' Gant's face was open with shock. 'How big?'

'Three, maybe four feet — right across the floe, if my guess is right.'

'Where, man — where? Show me!' He dragged at Peck's sleeve, and the big man turned round, following him. Gant's white, desperate face disturbed him, especially the way he kept moving ahead in obvious impatience and then looking round, like a dog hurrying its master. Seerbacker, puzzled, followed in their wake.

The pressure ridge was almost four feet high and it had emerged from the ice like a low wall stretching, right across the floe, as far as Gant could see in either direction.

'You said it — goes all the way?'

'All the way — I walked a fair piece of it, in both directions. I guess it goes right across.'

Gant looked as though he disbelieved Peck for a moment but he knew that the engineer would have understood the significance of the ridge, and would have checked its extent for the right reason.

'How — did it happen?' he said stupidly.

'Only one way,' the big man said grimly. 'Ousting wind drove one of the smaller floes behind us right up our ass — like an automobile smash. Result, one pressure-ridge.'

Gant turned on Peck, grabbing the sleeves of his parka in both hands. 'You realise what this means?' he said. 'I can't damn well get out of here. I can't take off!'

The result of his deliberations, of his self-recriminations and the growing certainty that he was right and the First Secretary was disastrously wrong was, Vladimirov reflected bitterly, nothing more than a hesitation, a glance in the direction of the most powerful man in the Soviet Union. When the bulky figure merely nodded, emphasising his last order, Vladimirov turned back to the console in front of him and spoke.

'Tretsov — Vladimirov.' Though he had ignored code, he would not identify the aircraft with which he was communicating, other than by the pilot's name. In that lay a degree of anonymity.

At that moment, Tretsov, tide second test-pilot on the Mig-31 project was at fifty thousand feet, his nose-probe buried in the udder of a refuelling plane, with which the Mig had made rendezvous minutes before.

Static crackled through the console speaker. 'Tretsov — over,' came the faint voice.

'Vladimirov to Tretsov. Proceed to the North Cape area as soon as refuelling is completed.'

'North Cape — repeat your message please.'

Vladimirov's voice betrayed his anger. Of course the pilot wondered at the change of plan!

'I said North Cape — make radio contact with the following units — missile-cruiser Riga, "Wolfpack" ground patrol Murmansk — do you copy?'

After a silence: 'Tretsov — I copy. Proceed to North Cape, contact Riga and ground control Murmansk — over.'

'Good. Await further instructions — over and out.'

Vladimirov flicked the switch, and turned away from the transmitter. It did not matter, he thought, that the Americans would undoubtedly pick up the signal, transmitted in clear voice as it had been. It was merely another unit being directed towards the decoy area. He looked once more at the First Secretary but the Soviet leader was in whispered conversation with Andropov. He turned his gaze towards Kutuzov. The old man's rheumy eyes met his, and he shook his head slightly. Vladimirov's eyes thanked him for the gesture of sympathy, of understanding.

Then the thoughts began to nag at him again. If only he could be sure in some way… He knew how it had been done, what the search-units ought to be looking for. But he was afraind, afraid to risk the shreds of his credibility, the remains of his career, on such a wild idea. He swallowed. He knew the answer — and he knew the First Secretary would not listen.

He despised himself. He was throwing away the Mig-31, handing it to the Americans on a platter! Yet he could do nothing — they would not believe him.

They had checked the floe. As Peck has surmised, the ridge ran the whole east-west axis. It was a little more than half-way down the length of the floe, down the runway for the aircraft. Gant could not possibly, by any mechanical or physical means, take off along the length of snow-covered ice available to him while the ridge remained.

'It will work, sir,' Peck was saying, leaning forward, standing taller than the thin figure of Seerbacker. Fleischer, his training and experience inadequate for these particular circumstances, remained silent. Peck's second engineer, Haynes, contributed his assessments of time and effort in support of his chief. With Gant, there were now five of them, standing stiffly in the raw air, wrapped in the mist that still clung to the floe. The wind was still gusting, but less strongly now as if, having achieved its purpose, it had become satisfied, quiescent.

'Hell, Jack — have we enough axes and shovels on board to do the job?' Seerbacker said. His eyes slid for a moment towards Gant, who seemed to be studying the floe intently, taking no notice of the discussion. Seerbacker was irritated by the man's apparent detachment, then dismissed it from his mind.

'Sir, we've got enough — crowbars, heavy screwdrivers, axes — anything!' Peck seemed to take Seerbacker's caution as a personal affront. 'And we could place a couple of small charges, maybe?' he added.

'Damn that, Jack!'

'No, sir. You place 'em properly, small ones — you won't damage the ice!'

Seerbacker was silent for a moment, then he said, addressing Gant:

'How wide is the wheel-track on that bird, Gant?'

'Twenty-two feet,' Gant replied mechanically.

'You certain?'

Gant merely nodded, without shifting his gaze from the ridge. He kicked at it aimlessly with a boot. Some loose snow flicked away, spattered on the toe — he had not marked the surface of the ridge.

'How much d'you need — how much of this wall you want to come down?' Peck said.

Gant turned his head, recognising the challenge in the big man's voice. He smiled humourlessly, thought for a moment, and then said: 'Thirty feet.'

There was a leaden silence for a moment, then Seerbacker said:

'Don't bullshit, Gant. You're not going to waste my time and wreck that bird just to prove something to my chief engineer!' His eyes flickered between the two men, sensing the challenge and response, its origins in Gant's earlier momentary panic in front of Peck.

'Thirty feet,' Gant said. 'That's all I'll need.'

'Then it's thirty fuckin' feet you'll get, mister!' Seerbacker spat back. 'Now you pick out the spot, man — and Mr. Peck and his team will get to work for you!'

Gant strolled away from them, and the four men tagged wearily behind him, as if unwilling. Seerbacker regretted the way he had handled Gant, bridling him, making him say something which he would obviously regret. Yet there was no sign of doubt on Gant's face, no fear that a margin for error of four feet on either side of the main undercart in the visibility now available to him was almost like cutting his throat with a blunt knife.

Damn him to hell! Seerbacker thought. He gets right under my skin!

Gant stopped, waited for them, and said: 'Here.'

He kicked a boot hard into the ice at the crest of the ridge at stomach height, and chipped the crest slightly. Peck reached into the pocket of his parka, pulled out an aerosal can, and sprayed it on the ice. Part of the chipped portion of crest sagged under the impact of the alcohol-based de-icing fluid. Gant paced out thirty feet, and waited for Peck to mark the ice. Then he nodded. Seerbacker sensed they were almost in the centre of the ridge, near the centre of the floe. Gant had picked the longest north-south axis for his take-off.

'How long to clear thirty feet, Mr. Peck?' Seerbacker asked.

'An hour, sir — if you include the spraying-down.' -

Gant wanted to tell them it was too long — but there was no point in futile protest.

'An hour?'

Peck nodded. Seerbacker was silent for a moment, then tugged his handset from his pocket. He pressed the button, and said: 'Waterson — hook me up to the ship's address system, huh?' He waited until his request was accomplished, and then he said: 'This is the captain — hear this. It will take one hour for the pressure-ridge to be cleared, and that means we have to stay on the surface for that length of time. I want utmost vigilance at all time; air, surface, and subsurface searches to be thorough. If any of you guys misses something, you kill all of us — understand that. You won't just be shitting on yourself or your service record! And you stay rigged for silent running — we're going to be making enough noise up here for all of you, so keep it quiet. You guys on the plane — just keep it de-iced and ready to roll the minute you get the word. Mr. Peck is in charge of the shore-party to work on the ridge, and I'll let him tell you who's volunteered, and what equipment he wants out here. Just a minute — Doc?' There was a pause, then:

'Yes, skipper?'

'What about our casualties?'

'Harper's concussed — hit that hard head of his on the deckplates. Smith lost a couple of teeth fighting the ice, and I'm putting four stitches in the back of Riley's skull. Anything else is less dramatic than that.'

'Thanks Doc. Tell Riley it should improve his brain — and Smith's looks will definitely have improved! O.K., here's Mr. Peck, you guys. Hear him good.'

He switched off and pocketed his own handset, and left Peck calling out his list of names, the catalogue of brawn that the Pequod was able to muster.

Seerbacker joined Gant. He stared at him for a moment, then said: 'You are sure?'

Gant nodded.

'Don't worry — Peck doesn't get to me. I can get out through thirty feet of clear ice.'

'In visibility like this?'

'In worse.'

'Hell, man — O.K., but it's your funeral.'

There was a silence, then Gant said: 'Thanks, Seerbacker — for the hour.'

Seerbacker felt awkward. Gant, he sensed, was making a real effort, meant what he was saying.

'Yeah — sure. I wouldn't do it for just anybody, though,' he said, and grinned.

'I–I'll go take a look at the plane.'

'Sure, you do that.'

Gant nodded, and walked away. Near the Pequod, he could see figures hurrying through the grey curtain of the mist, wrapped in the white breath of their effort Peck, he thought without rancour, was a taskmaster, and when he said jump, they jumped. It wasn't his business. Peck knew what he was doing.

It had been his suggestion, from the beginning. The crude hacking out of a section of the ridge, then the smoothing process to follow, the former accomplished by brute force and axes, the latter by spraying the broken section of the ridge with the superheated steam that drove the turbines of the submarine, directed onto the ice by pressure hoses.

The Firefox was clear of ice. Alongside, looking as if it had strayed from some gigantic toolshed, was a ten-foot piece of equipment resembling nothing so much as a garden-spray. This was linked by a hose to a fluid tank in the sail of the Pequod, and from it, pumped by a small electric motor, gushed a stream of alcohol-based anti-icing fluid — the 'booze' as Seerbacker's crew referred to it. This kept the wings and fuselage free of ice. Four men operated the sprayer — two men pushed it on its undercarriage, and two others directed the fine, pressurised spray from two small hoses tucked beneath their arms. They went about their task with a mechanical, unthinking precision, and Gant could see the light indentations of the wheels beneath the sprayer where they had ceaselessly circumnavigated the plane.

Gant stood and watched the Firefox for a long time, as if drawn to the machine, as if feeding through his eyes. He had had no time until now, no moment of being outside the plane with time to absorb its lines, its design, its functional wickedness of appearance. The first time — there had only been the confused impression of noise, and light, and the fire at the far end of the hangar, and Baranovich's white-coated figure lumped on the concrete… Now he watched in silence, taking in the slim fuselage, the bulging air-intakes in front of the massive engines, larger than anything Turmansky had ever thought of fitting to an interceptor-attack plane, the seemingly impossible stubbiness of the wings, with the advanced Anab missiles slung in position beneath them. He saw the scorch marks where he had fired two of them — one to bring down the Badger, the other to goad the captain of the Riga into premature action. He walked closer. The two missiles had been replaced, making up his complement of four.

This didn't really surprise him. A Mig-25 had been captured from the Syrians in the dummy-run for this operation. Presumably, it had been armed and its missiles, Anabs, had been assigned to Seerbacker, for delivery. Buckholz, Gant realised, missed nothing.

The refuelling had been completed even while he, Seerbacker and Peck had discussed the ridge. The hoses had been withdrawn, the bonding wire removed from the nose-wheel strut Presumably, the refuelling crew were now taking their turn at the ridge.

He walked away with reluctance, then, as the distance increased, and the Firefox became a shadowy, insubstantial bulk in the mist, he lengthened his stride.

It took him almost half-an-hour to walk from the Firefox to the southerly end of the floe and then to traverse the floe from south to north, along the line of his visualised runway. The collision of the floes had not damaged the runway, other than by the ridge. He was returning from the northern edge of the floe when the handset that Fleischer had issued him bleeped in his pocket.

'Yes?'

'Gant?' Seerbacker's voice sounded laboured, out of breath. 'Listen to me, mister. We've got three sonar contacts to the south of us, along your flight-path.'

Gant was silent for a moment, then he said: 'Yes — it has to be the cruiser and her two escorts — hunter-killer subs.'

'Jesus — you know how to make trouble for me, Gant — you really, really do!'

'How long before they get here?'

'Forty — maybe forty-five minutes.'

'Then that's enough time.'

'Fuck you, mister! Enough time for you to get the hell out of here — what about my ship? What about its gallant crew who are at this moment working their tails off to get you a runway you can use?'

'I–I'm sorry, Seerbacker — I didn't think…'

Almost as if he were winning a point, Seerbacker replied:

'Anyway — it'll take longer than we thought. It seems Mr. Peck was a little optimistic in his estimates. We'll need almost the same time to get you out of here as they'll need to catch up on us!'

Gant was silent. Eventually, Seerbacker said: 'You still there, Gant?'

'Uh — yeah. You sure they're heading this way?'

'Maybe, maybe not. They weren't, that's for sure.'

'Weren't?'

'They were steaming west, across the track of the floe, but sure as hell is hot, Gant, if we can see them, then they can damn well see us!'

Ten THE DUEL

Vladimirov confronted the First Secretary, a renewed sense of purpose doing little to contradict or overcome the tension he felt. He knew, with a sickening certainty, that he did not want to throw his career away, that he wanted Kutuzov's rank and post when the old man was put out to grass. Yet he was contained within a dilemma. Even if he managed to quell the rising doubts and proceed as ordered, there was still the chance that, if Gant succeeded in escaping with the Mig-31 intact, he himself would be blamed for the Soviet failure to recapture or destroy. It was that knowledge finally that persuaded him to demand that action be taken with regard to the sonar-contact reported by the Riga a minute before.

'In my estimation, First Secretary,' he began, keeping his voice neutral, level, with a vast effort of will, 'this contact, though confused by the presence of icefloes, is worth investigation.'

His words seemed to be swallowed in the silence of the War Command Centre. Vladinurov was aware that everybody, from Andropov down to the most junior radio-operator, understood that the room had polarised around the First Secretary and the O.C. 'Wolfpack'. They were spectators in a power game being played out between the two men. They seemed to the General, tense with anticipation, almost to appreciate the fact that he was at last making his move — his final move.

'In your estimation,' the Soviet leader said softly after a while, his voice seeming to blame Vladimirov for speaking.

Vladimirov nodded. Then he said: 'I–I am sure that I understand now how they intend to refuel the Mig at sea…' He chose the cryptic words with care. He had to play the First Secretary like a recalcitrant, dangerous fish, a shark. Yet he had committed himself. If his assumption proved to be correct, and they still failed, it would be tantamount to professional suicide to have voiced his ideas. The wild idea had grown in him slowly; he had tried to deny it, rid himself of it and the personal perspectives it evoked. Now, however, it possessed him, and he could no longer avoid its communication to the First Secretary. Damnation, he thought, almost grinding his teeth as he envisaged the consequences of his ensuing conflict with the Soviet leader — but it was their last and only chance to prevent the Mig from falling into American hands, delivered by Gant.

His hatred of Gant burnt at the back of his throat like nausea.

'Yes — they have used — are using — a large ice-floe as a runway, and the refuelling vessel is undoubtedly a submarine. That is the sonar-contact that the Riga has made!' In bald, hurried words, the idea seemed ridiculous, unconvincing. Yet, in his mind, he could visualise the scene so clearly! The parka-clothed figures, the fuel-lines, the aircraft sitting on the ice… there were a thousand floes the Americans could have chosen from!

'The aircraft has landed, Vladimirov?'

Vladimirov knew he had lost. The voice, dry and calm, told him he had failed to convince. He looked around him. Faces turned away, stares directed aside, or downwards, not meeting his eyes. Even Kutuzov turned away, the eyes of a spectator at a road accident.

'Yes.' His voice was too high, he knew it. Damn, he could not even control his voice any more! How was it, he wondered, that the man was able to frighten him from the other side of the map-table, on the surface of which the coloured lights scuttled towards the North Cape? They had accepted Aubrey's decoys — Vladimirov knew they were decoys, aircraft and a submarine, bustling to no purpose but to trick them — and the total available Soviet air and sea forces had been ordered to dash for the North Cape. The man in front of him now possessed power that could ruin him, drop him, crush him, imprison him — say that he was mad. And Vladimirov did not want to end up like Grigorenko, in an asylum.

He tried once more.

'The contact is on the flight-path last registered by the Riga and her escorts — just before the trace was lost.'

Then he subsided into silence. He watched, almost like a spectator himself, as the large, square, grey-suited man stared, apparently idly, at the map-table. The Riga and the two escorting submarines were rapidly becoming solitary lights as the scene of Soviet surface and air activity moved further west. Then he looked up into Vladimirov's eyes. The incredulous General saw, from an instant before the eyes became hooded again, naked, stark fear. He could not assimilate the information, until the First Secretary said:

'It would take too long to recall the helicopters, and order them to make a search of the area. Instead, my dear General, because you seem to have this — obsessive concern with ice-floes and tanker-submarines…' He paused and Andropov, seated now next to him, smiled thinly. He supplied the expected reaction, even as his humourless eyes behind the steel-framed spectacles indicated that he understood the motives of the Soviet leader. 'As I said — to give you peace of mind, my dear Vladimirov — we will despatch one of the escorting submarines to investigate this highly dubious sonar-contact that the cruiser claims to have made.' He smiled blandly, recovering from the moment of naked understanding he had seen in the Chairman's eyes.

'But, if it is…' Vladimirov began.

The First Secretary held up his huge hand 'One of the escorts, Vladimirov — how long will it take?'

'Forty minutes, no more.'

'Then — if there is anything to report, if the contact turns out to be interesting — the second Mig-31 will be ordered to return from its rendezvous off the North Cape — at top speed.'

It was over. Vladimirov felt the tension drain away, leaving him physically weak, exhausted. At least it was something. Yet he could not sense a victory. He was unable to do more than continue to despise himself.

Swiftly, as if to hide the feelings that must show on his face, he turned to the encoding-console to issue orders to the captain of the Riga.

Gant had watched the green sonar-screen and the sweep of its tireless arm until his eyes ached. The endless revolution of the arm, dragging the wash of whiteness behind it that left three crystallised points of light in its wake, unnerved him. After silent, tense minutes in the control room of the Pequod, leaning over the sailor wearing headphones, listening to the amplified pinging of the contact, it became apparent what was occurring. One of the blips on the screen, one of the escort submarines, had detached itself from its westward course, and was moving along the line of a bearing that would bring it homing on the Pequod. The other two blips continued on their westward course.

As yet the blips appeared only on the long-range sonar-screen, the extent of whose survey carried for a thirty-mile radius around the submarine. They were at the top of the screen — and the sonar had been working in a directional sweep, when the three vessels had been picked up. Now, the blip of the escort submarine homing on them was little more than twenty miles away.

After a huge silence filled only with the quick human breathing of the crew and the reiterated pinging of the contact-echo, Seerbacker, at Gant's elbow, said, 'How long before it gets here?'

The operator didn't look up, but said: 'Can't say, sir. You know what this long-range sonar is like — distortion factor of twenty per cent, sometimes. I can't be sure, sir.'

'Hell!'

'How fast can those Russian subs move?' Gant said.

'How the hell do I know?' Seerbacker stormed, turning on him, his long face white with anger, and fear. 'I don't even know what kind of submarine it is, man! Until it transfers from the long-range screen into close-up, we can't get a 3-D image of it from the computer that'll identify it.'

'Contact bearing Red Three-Niner, and closing,' the operator called out, apparently undisturbed by the emotions of Seerbacker snarled in his ear.

'What — will you do?' Gant asked.

Seerbacker looked at him for a moment, and then said:

'I have a sealed packet for you — your route, I guess. That's the first thing. Second, I have to get our disguise out the wardrobe, and dust it off!'

Gant looked at him, puzzled.

'Contact still bearing Red Three-Niner and closing.'

Seerbacker looked at the operator's neck, as if he wished the man dead, or dumb at least, then he said: 'Give me the blower.' Fleischer thrust the microphone into his hand, and pressed the alert button at the side of the transmitter, signalling the crew to prepare for a message from the captain.

Seerbacker nodded, and then said into the microphone: 'Hear this — this is the captain. It's operate "Harmless" procedure, on the double. We have about thirty minutes, maybe less, I doubt more. Get the lead out of your asses, and move — move as fast as you've ever moved before.'

Having relieved his tension by way of bullying his crew, Seerbacker turned to Gant with a more even countenance. Smiling, he nodded towards the watertight door leading to his cabin, and Gant followed in his wake.

'What is "Harmless"?' he asked as the footsteps clicked along the companionway.

Seerbacker was silent until he turned into his cabin, Gant still behind him, and had locked the door. Then he went to a wall-safe, cranked the dial, and pulled the small door open. He handed Gant a package inside a cellophane wrapper. Gant nodded, as Seerbacker's two-fingered grip revealed the presence of an acid capsule within the clear plastic, the 'auto-destruct' for the sealed orders.

Gant unfolded the single sheet of flimsy within the envelope, studying it carefully.

'What is "Harmless"?' he repeated.

Seerbacker grinned. 'Just our little joke — only it may save our lives,' he said. 'Well go up top, in a while — you can see for yourself.'

Gant nodded, as if the answer to his question did not really interest him. His orders were simple. There was a list of map coordinates, and times, which he knew would take him at first low across the Finnish coast, east of the North Cape decoy area, across the lake-strewn landscape of Finland, towards Stockholm. Once there, where the Gulf of Bothnia encountered the Baltic, he was instructed to rendezvous with the late afternoon British Airways commercial flight from Stockholm to London. He knew why. If he tucked in behind the plane, and below it, not only would he be out of sight of the crew, but all that would show up on an infra-red screen would be the single image of the airliner's heat-source. And the airliner would be expected across the North Sea, en route and on schedule. And he was immune to any sort of detection other than visual — an unlikely possibility. No Elint ship in the North Sea warned to watch for him would guess where he was. When he arrived at a specified coordinate off the English coast, he was to call RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire on a frequency within the general aviation band, assuming the identity of a test-flight for a commercial passenger plane receiving its Certificate of Airworthiness check-up. With luck, if it worked, the Russians would lose him, if they had ever found him, off the eastern coast of Sweden, when he linked infrared images with the British Airways flight.

He read the coordinates once more, committing them firmly to memory. Then he replaced the sheet in its buff envelope, and the envelope in its wrapper. Seerbacker had already placed a large steel ashtray on the table. Gant placed the packet in the ashtray, then ground the heel of his hand on it Almost immediately, the fumes of the released acid rose pungently and the packet began to dissolve. Gant watched it until it consisted of no more than a few blackened, treacly specks. Then he nodded, as if to himself, and said: 'O.K. - let's get urgent, Captain. I want to see what progress has been made on my runway.' His eyes, surprisingly to Seerbacker, almost twinkled for a moment, and he added: 'And I want to see "Harmless".'

Of course, Aubrey reflected, he could not be certain — no, not by a very long way, not just at present. Nevertheless, he was unable quite to extinguish the small flame of hope that warmed his stomach like good brandy; the heat of success. The code activity from the Russians, combined with the success of the decoy-missions around the North Cape area, and the signal from Seerbacker aboard the Pequod that the Firefox was safely down, and refuelled — all added to his barely suppressed sense of satisfaction.

Shelley, too, he could see, could hardly keep a schoolboyish grin from his smooth features. The Americans, having swung down with the graph of Buckholz's doubts, been infected by indecision, now lifted in a rising curve again. Curtin was on the steps, adjusting the positions of Russian planes and vessels as they moved further and further into the decoy area. Aubrey glanced up at the huge map, and saw only the position of the floe, and the coloured pin representing the Firefox alongside.

Had Seerbacker risked getting off another signal, to confirm the sonar-contact with the approaching Russian submarine, or had Aubrey been aware of Vladimirov's intuition, and partial success in Bilyarsk, his mood might have been less equable, his ego-temperature somewhat lower. But he was still blinded by the brilliance of his own design, and Seerbacker had not informed him of the suspicious escort submarine in his vicinity. For Aubrey, the design had become now only a mechanical matter — as long as Gant followed instructions, it was in the bag.

Aubrey maintained that he was a man who never, absolutely on no occasion, counted his chickens — but now he did. The magnitude of what he had achieved, from inception, through planning, to execution, stunned him, shone like a fierce sun on his vanity, causing it to bloom.

'Hm — gentlemen,' he said, clearing his throat. 'I realise that perhaps this may be a little premature…' He smiled deprecatingly, knowing that they shared his mood. 'Nevertheless — perhaps we might permit ourselves a little — a modicum of celebratory alcohol?'

Buckholz grinned openly. 'You sure put it tortuously, Aubrey — but yes, I reckon we could open a bottle,' he said.

'Good.'

Aubrey moved to the drinks trolley that had stood throughout their vigil in the corner of the operations room. Suddenly, the place seemed to be without the stale, almost rancid, smell of old cigar smoke and unchanged clothing. The faces were no longer strained with tension. It was merely that they were a little tired — tired with the satisfying tiredness of a job well done, of something completed.

He broke the seal on the malt whisky, and poured the pale gold liquid into four tumblers in generous measures. Then, deferentially, he handed the drinks round on a small silver tray, brought from his own flat, in readiness.

Aubrey raised his glass, smiled benignly, and said: 'Gentlemen — to the Firefox… and, of course, to Gant.'

'Gant — and the Firefox,' the four men chanted in a rough unison. Aubrey watched, with mild distaste, as Buckholz threw his drink into the back of his throat, swallowed the precious liquid in one. Really, he thought the man has absolutely no taste — none at all.

As he sipped at his own drink, it seemed more than ever merely a matter of time. He glanced at the telephone. In a few minutes, no more, it would be time to order the car to transport them to RAF Scampton — if Gant were not to arrive before themselves, which would not do at all.

He smiled at the thought.

Peck was standing in front of Gant and Seerbacker, looming over them both. Sweat rimed the fur of his hood in crystals of ice, and ice stood out stiffly on his moustache. His face was pale, drained by effort.

'Well?' Seerbacker said, his hand still on the sail-ladder of the Pequod.

'It's done, sir,' Peck said. Then he looked at Gant, and his voice hardened. 'We've cleared your damn runway, Mr. Gant!'

'Peck!' Seerbacker warned.

For a moment, Gant thought the huge Chief Engineer was intending to strike him, and he flinched physically. Then he said: 'I'm sorry, Peck.'

Peck seemed nonplussed by his reply. He scrutinised Gant's face, as if suspecting some trick, nodded as he appeared satisfied, and then seemed to feel that some explanation was required of him. He said: 'Sorry — Major…' Gant's eyes opened in surprise. It was the first time anyone had used his old rank. Peck meant it as a mark of respect. 'We — it's just the feeling, sir. Working out there on that damn pressure-ridge, the men and me — well, we just kept thinking how we could have been getting out of this place, instead of breaking our backs.' The big man's voice tailed off, and he looked steadily down at his feet.

Gant said: 'It's O.K., Peck — and thanks. Now, tell me where we are, what stage have you reached.'

Peck became business-like, immediately formal. 'We've got a thirty-feet gap hacked out of the ridge. Now we run the hoses from the turbine on a direct-feed — we need a lot of pipe, Major — it'll take time.'

Gant nodded.

'Get to it, Peck — the sooner you've done, the sooner you can get going. When you've finished smoothing down the surface of the floe — and make it as smooth as possible, 'cos I don't want to hit a bump at a hundred-and-fifty knots — I want you to spray steam on the ice, down the length of the runway, starting as near the northern edge of the floe as you can, running down to the Firefox — if you have the time.'

Peck looked puzzled. 'Why, Major?'

'Clear the surface snow, Peck — that's what it'll do. I don't need to be held back by the surface-resistance…'

'Get to it, Peck,' Seerbacker said. 'I've just got to check on the decoy procedure, and then I'm coming to take a look at your night-school efforts!'

Peck grinned, nodded, and moved away down the length of the Pequod, forward to the hatch above the turbines, where two members of the engineering crew were feeding down great serpent-loops of hose into the belly of the submarine.

'You want to see "Harmless"?' Seerbacker said. 'Come take a look.'

'Harmless' was hurried, crude, and brilliant, Gant was forced to admit. The feverish activity of those members of the sub's crew not working on the pressure-ridge at first seemed to obey no overall strategy, tend towards no definable object. Then he realised what was happening.

The submarine was being transformed into the headquarters of an Arctic weather-station. Over the transmitter in his pocket, Seerbacker snapped out orders that the torpedo-tubes and forward crew-quarters were to be flushed out with sea water, the evidence of the paraffin to be removed. This would be followed by faked evidence of hull damage to explain the presence of residual water in both compartments. On the ice, a hut had been assembled from its components, and crude wooden furniture carried inside. Maps and charts covered the newly erected walls, Gant saw as he peered through one of the windows. Impressive lists of figure-filled notepads and sheets attached to clipboards. Two masts had been erected, one twenty feet high, the other reaching to thirty feet. The taller of the pair was a radio mast, while an anemometer revolved on the top of the other one, and below this a vane swung, indicating direction of the measured wind.

A white chest, a Stephenson Screen, containing thermometers and hygrometers, stood beneath the smaller mast, and the disguising of the floe as a weather-station was completed by holes drilled into the ice, in some cases through to the sea beneath, into which thermometers had been lowered.

As Gant watched Peck and his men unroll the lengths of hose, slip the sections together, he saw a bright orange weather-balloon float up into the sky. Still clinging to the surface of the floe were shredding, rolling embers of mist, but above it, the cloud base began at thirteen thousand feet. A second balloon hovered a hundred feet above the Pequod, attached by a nylon line. The balloons would explain the earlier release of a signal balloon when he landed.

It took a little more than fifteen minutes to transform the surface of the floe into the appearance of a U.S. weather-station studying the movements and characteristics of a large ice-floe in its southward path to immolation. The fact that the Pequod was operating in the northern Barents Sea, rather than east of Greenland, was the only weakness as far as Gant could see.

As Seerbacker said, as he joined Gant near the bridge-ladder of the submarine: 'They can't prove a thing, Gant — as long as you're long gone from here before that Russian boat climbs all over us!'

Gant glanced reflectively down at the ice, and then said: 'What about the exhaust — they'll be keeping infra-red watch on this floe. They must have tumbled something?'

'Hell, Gant — I don't give a cuss for your heat-trail. Just get that bird out of here, and leave me to do the worrying, will you?'

Gant smiled at the mock ferocity of Seerbacker's answer. The man was frightened, knew he was treading a fine edge of ground steel. He nodded. 'Sure. I'll get out of here, just as soon as I can.'

'Good.' Seerbacker plucked the radio-transmitter from the pocket of his parka, pressed it to his cheek, and flicked the switch. 'This is the Captain — you there, Fleischer?'

'Sir.' From the radio, Fleischer's voice had a quality of unreality, one that impressed upon Gant the whole situation — the tiny floe, the bitter wastes of the Barents Sea, the approach of the Russian hunter-killer submarine.

'What's the news on our friend?'

There was a pause, then the Exec, said: 'We're getting a computer-prediction now, sir. Subject to a seven-per-cent error in the sonar-contact… '

'Yeah. Tell me the bad news.'

'The ETA for the sub is seventeen minutes.'

'Jesus!'

'Course and speed appear to be exactly the same, sir. She's coming straight for us.'

Seerbacker wore a strained look on his face for a moment, then he grinned at Gant. 'You hear that?' Gant nodded. 'O.K. Fleischer — I'm leaving this set on receive from now on — I want you to call it to me every minute, understand?'

'Sir.'

'When the sub comes up on close-range sonar, call me the exact speed and distance every thirty seconds.'

'Sir.'

Seerbacker clipped the handset to the breast pocket of his parka, tugged at it to ensure that it wouldn't come adrift, nodded to Gant, and headed away from the submarine in the direction indicated by the two hoses which trailed like endless black snakes away into the mist. Following him, the ridge still out of sight, the violent hiss of steam hardly audible, Gant was once more possessed by a sense of the precariousness of his position. The hunched, loping figure of Seerbacker seemed slight, almost unsubstantial, certainly not a presence capable of supporting the weight of his escape. The firm ice beneath his feet, the glimpse of the Firefox in the mist as he turned his head to glance at it — they did not reassure him. The Russian submarine was homing on the floe and the Pequod. They had sixteen minutes, give or take a little.

Two men manned each nozzle, directing a jet of superheated steam onto the ugly, unfinished plaster-work of the hole in the ridge. It was supposed to be thirty feet across. Gant's brain measured it — to his imagination it looked small, too small. The steam played over the rough surface of the floe, over the hacked, torn edges of the gap — smoothing it out. It took them only a couple of minutes to give the gap smooth edges, a smooth, gleaming floor.

Peck had turned once, acknowledged the presence of Gant and the captain, and then ignored them. As soon as the gap was smoothed to his satisfaction, he bawled at his team: 'All right, you guys — get this runway smoothed off!'

'What for, chief?'

'Because I'm telling you to do it — you'll enjoy it, Clemens!'

The hoses snaked away into the mist, unwillingly following the men dragging at them. They snaked past Gant's feet, slowly, far too slowly. He looked at his watch, just as Fleischer's voice squawked from near Seerbacker's shoulder.

'The sub's transferred to close-range screen, sir.'

Seerbacker leant his head like a bird attending to ruffled feathers, and said: 'Tell me the worst.'

'Computer-identification: Russian, type hunter-killer submarine, range four-point-six miles, ETA nine minutes… '

'What?' Seerbacker bawled.

'Sorry, sir — the sonar-error must have been larger than we thought… '

'Now you tell me!' Seerbacker was silent for an instant, then he said: 'Get off the air — Peck!'

'Sir?'

'You heard that, Chief?'

'Yes, sir — we'll never get this runway cleared, not a thirty-yard width all the way down the floe.'

Seerbacker looked at Gant. 'What the hell do you want?' he said.

'I — a hundred yards this side of the floe,' Gant replied, pointing beyond the gap in the ridge, to the north. 'Just give me that, and a clear runway this side of the gap.' He waved his hand towards the Firefox.

Seerbacker repeated his instructions. Peck sounded dubious that he could complete the work, but affirmed that he would try. Gant stared into the mist, saw the huddled, squat shapes of men moving closer, straining as they dragged the unwilling hoses back on their tracks. He heard the recommencement of the spraying, smoothing out his runway, blasting the loose, powdery surface snow clear. If he was to reach the take-off speed he required, it had to be done. And he had to wait until it was done.

Seerbacker was speaking again. 'Give me a status report on "Harmless" — and this is the last time anyone refers to anything except the weather — understand?' He listened intently, almost leaning forward on the balls of his feet. When the voice at the other end had finished, he nodded in apparent satisfaction. Then he looked at Gant. 'It's O.K. - we're covered, as long as we get you airborne.'

'ETA seven minutes.' Fleischer's voice was infected by something that sounded dangerously like panic.

'When he contacts you — give him the low-down, like on the script — O.K., Dick?' Seerbacker's voice was soothing.

'Sir.'

Gant watched the steam skid across the snow. Blasts of powder lifted into the misty air. The hoses snaked nearer, the men straining at them, joined now by other, anonymous figures who passed Gant, summoned by Peck's call over the handset. Around the men, the self-inflicted blizzard raged, until Gant himself was enveloped in the blinding white smoke.

'ETA six minutes… still no radio contact, sir.' Gant heard Fleischer's voice coming squeakly from the settling storm, saw the thin figure of Seerbacker outlined once more as the hoses passed away down the floe towards the plane. He wiped the snow from his stubbled face with the back of a mitten.

Seerbacker remained silent for a long time, his back to Gant as he watched Peck's party clearing the runway. To him, they appeared to be moving slowly, far too slowly. Unable to bear the tension or the silence any longer, he turned to Gant, and said:

'Are they going to make it?'

Gant nodded. 'A minute to spare,' he said.

'Can you get out of here in that time?'

'So far away, you wouldn't believe!' Gant said, with a grim smile.

'You better be right, mister — you just better be!'

'The contact is confirmed, First Secretary!' Vladimirov said, his hand slamming down on the map-table, so that the lights joggled and blurred for a moment.

The man in front of him seemed unmoved, perhaps still even contemptuous of the military man's urgency Vladimirov knew that he was risking everything now, that there was no time for the niceties of career, and politics. He had known that it was an American submarine, and he had known its purpose. The silence had told on him. He was white and strained, and there was sweat on his forehead. He sensed that, alone in the room, only the old man, Kutuzov, supported him. Even he was silent.

'Vladimirov, calm yourself!' the First Secretary growled.

'Calm — calm myself?' Vladimirov's voice was high-pitched, out of control. He had committed himself now, he knew. Yet he could not stand by, even though he had schooled himself to do so, tried to quell the pendular motion of self-interest and duty that had plagued him throughout the morning. He had been unable to eat lunch, there had been such tightness in his stomach, such a knot of fear. Perhaps, he sensed, it was that he was afraid, the appalling knowledge that he was a coward, that had driven him to do his duty.

'Yes — calm yourself!'

'How can I be calm — when your stupidity — stupidity, is losing that aircraft to the Americans? You have read the file — you know what this man Gant is. He could land that aircraft on an ice-floe, and take off again. Listen to me — before it's too late!'

Like a frozen hare, Vladimirov watched the emotions chase each other across the face of the First Secretary. The initial hot rage at the insult was controlled in an instant, becoming once more the cold contempt of habit; a sense of sadistic pleasure seemed present to Vladimirov — lastly, he saw the emotion for which he searched — doubt.

Vladimirov pressed on, knowing that, even as he ruined himself, that the First Secretary was afraid to ignore him any longer. The Soviet leader was unable to hold Vladimirov's gaze, and turned to look over his shoulder at Andropov. The Chairman's face was inscrutable.

'You must act, First Secretary — it is too late for politics.'

The big man seemed as if poised to spring at the O.C. 'Wolfpack', then he summoned a smile to his face, lightness to his voice: 'Very well, Vladimirov, very well, if it means that much to you…' The voice hardened. 'If you are so ready to — spoil things by your behaviour — I can do no more than humour you.' He waved his hand in a generous gesture. 'What is it you require?'

'The immediate recall of the second Mig from the North Cape rendezvous.'

Vladimirov felt his voice tighten in his throat. His energy drained away. Now there was nothing left but fear, the sense of lost honours, of power thrown away. His victory was a bitter, icy moment in time. The First Secretary nodded, once. It did not matter about the remainder of the massive forces mis-directed to the Cape. Not now. Only the second Mig-31 and Tretsov could affect the outcome this late. And, as if in recompense for his career sacrifice, he wanted Gant dead now, wanted Tretsov to finish him.

As he crossed to the console to issue orders to Tretsov, he glanced in the direction of Kutuzov. He thought for a moment, that he saw a kindly, even admiring, wisdom in the rheumy eyes, coupled with a profound compassion. Then he received the impression that the old man was detached, unaware of what was going on. He felt very alone, unable to decide which impression was the truth.

He snapped out his orders — possibly the last orders he would issue as O.C. 'Wolfpack', he reflected grimly — in a calm, level voice, aware of the eyes behind him, watching him. The room was still with tension.

As Tretsov acknowledged, and the second Mig altered course for the ice-floe using its top speed of over four thousand miles an hour, Vladimirov grasped at this last chance that Tretsov would kill Gant.

'They're calling, sir — want identification immediately sir,' Fleischer's voice creaked out of the handset still clipped to Seerbacker's top pocket.

'The hell they do. You know the routine, it's written down. Do it.'

'The Russian wants to speak to you sir.'

'Tell him I'll be along — I'm engaged in goddam experiments at the other end of the floe! Tell him I'll be along.'

'Sir. ETA three minutes and fourteen seconds.'

The conversation had gone on somewhere outside Gant, at a great distance. He and Seerbacker, waiting now by the aircraft, watching the snail-like approach of the men and the hoses, were miles apart in reality. Gant knew, almost to the second, how much time was left, and how much time they needed. They had precisely one minute to spare.

Seerbacker was visibly on edge. The voice of Fleischer acted on his lanky form like a twitch of the puppeteer's strings, pulling him taut He could not, as the Russian closed on the Pequod, any longer believe that the crude hut, the bogus charts, and the thermometers and the masts, would save him. Gant, however, was like a passenger whose train has arrived, calmly collecting the luggage of his thoughts prior to departure. He was no longer what Seerbacker had privately, thought him, a man without a past on his way to no discernible future. He was in transit, and the figures on the landscape of mist and ice had little or nothing to do with him.

'Hell — they'll never make it!' Seerbacker snapped, unable to bear the tension.

'They will,' Gant said calmly, his voice so level, almost a whisper, that Seerbacker looked at him curiously.

'Man, but you're cool…'

Gant smiled. 'Somebody once told me I was dead — the flying corpse they called me in Vietnam,' Gant said.

'You minded?'

'No.' Gant replied, shaking his head slightly. 'Most of the guys who used the name were dead before they pulled us out… missiles, AA guns, enemy planes.'

'Yes,' Seerbacker said softly. 'Hell of a war… '

Peck, sweating, pale, angry and weary, came towards them. There remained only a hundred yards of runway left to clear. He said, towering over Gant: 'We won't make it, mister — if you don't get that bird out of here before the Reds arrive, we're all for the Lubyanka!'

Gant shook his head. 'You have a minute in hand, Chief,' he said. Peck stared at him, his mouth opening and closing, his eyes reflecting baffled incomprehension which changed slowly to conviction.

'If you say so,' he muttered and turned away, back towards the hoses, exhorting his men blasphemously.

'You sure impress the hell out the Chief,' Seerbacker said with a thin smile. 'I just hope you don't have to do it to the Russians.'

'ETA two minutes and thirty seconds,' Fleischer said. 'He keeps asking for you, sir. He wants convincing — I don't think I've done a very good job.'

'To hell with that, Dick. Keep stalling him — does he look like surfacing? Has he asked any awkward questions?'

'No, sir. He seems just naturally suspicious — not as if he's looking for anything special.'

Powdery snow blew into Gant's face. For a moment, distracted by the voices, he glanced up at the cloudy sky half-hidden by the shreds of mist. Then he realised that it was the vanguard of Peck's blizzard. The hose-men were still on schedule. He smiled to himself, and pulled off the parka. Peck's men were forty yards away from the Firefox. The de-icing team trundled past him, and stopped to look enquiringly in his direction. He nodded at them, at which they seemed vastly relieved, and the giant garden-spray was wheeled speedily towards the Pequod, to be hauled aboard and stowed before the arrival of the Russians.

Gant waited, like a guest anxious to be gone, until Seerbacker had finished his conversation with his Exec.

Seerbacker seemed surprised that he was stripped to his anti-G suit once more. He smiled awkwardly. 'I — er, of course…' he said.

'So long, Seerbacker — and thanks.'

'Get out of here, you bum!' Seerbacker said with mock severity.

Gant nodded, and swung his foot to the lowest rung of the pilot's ladder set in the fuselage. He climbed up, and slid feet first into the cockpit There, he tugged on the integral helmet, plugged in the oxygen, the weapons-control jackplug, and the communications equipment. He needed first of all to taxi gently back to the southern extremity of the floe, where the snow had not, as yet, been cleared — it would be slowing, he knew, but he needed the maximum distance to the ridge. He went through the pre-start checks swiftly. He plugged in the anti-G suit automatically, even as he read off the dials and gauges that informed him of the condition of flaps, brakes and fuel. The fuel-tanks, he saw, smiling grimly, were satisfyingly full. It seemed aeons since there had been so much fuel in his universe. He pressed the hood control and it swung down, locked automatically, then he locked it manually. The handset issued him by Seerbacker was in the breastpocket of the pressure-suit. He heard Fleischer's voice, from a great distance, saying:

'ETA one minute and thirty seconds.'

'You hear that, Gant?' Seerbacker's voice chimed in. He continued, without waiting for a reply: 'Good luck, fella. Got to get Mr. Peck's suspicious hoses stowed now, so get out of here!'

Gant gang-loaded the ignition, switched on the after motors, turned on the high-pressure cock, and pressed the button. He heard, with relief, the sound of a double explosion as the cartridge start functioned. There was the same rapid, mounting whirring that he had heard in the hangar at Bilyarsk, as the huge turbines began to build. He switched in the fuel-booster, and eased open the throttles, until the rpm gauges were steady at twenty-seven per cent. He paused for only a second, then pushed the throttles open, until he reached the fifty-five per cent rpm, then he released the brakes. The Firefox did not move.

He hauled back the throttles, and applied the brakes again. Even though he knew instantly what it was, and knew that it could be cured, his own failure to anticipate it made him weak and chill with sweat.

He opened the hood, tugged open the face-mask, and yelled into the handset: 'Seerbacker — get those hoses over here — on the double!'

'What in the hell is it, Gant — can't you leave us…?'

'Get over here! The wheels, they've frozen in!'

'You're stuck — with those engines, man?'

Already, even as Seerbacker apparently argued with him, he saw Peck and the others tugging the hoses towards the aircraft.

'If I try and pull myself out, I'll end up on my belly!'

Looking over the side of the cockpit, he saw Seerbacker's face looking up at him. Seerbacker was openly grinning. Steam billowed around him, snow flew up around the cockpit of the Firefox as the superheated steam was played carefully over the embedded wheels. Gant had not needed to warn Peck that if he played too much steam onto the tyres, at too high a pressure, he would, literally, melt them.

Peck had understood. He emerged from beneath the fuselage, looked up at Gant, and said into his handset: 'O.K., Major Gant — now, for God's sake, get out of here!'

Gant signalled him with the thumbs-up, closed the hood once more, checked the gauges, and opened the throttles, until the rpm gauge once more showed fifty-five per cent. He released the brakes, the aircraft jolted out of the pits which the wheels and the applied steam had made, and rolled forward. Peck, Seerbacker an the others were moving away swiftly, tugging the thick, snaking hoses after them. Already, men were emerging from the Pequod, dressed in civilian parkas, the decoy scientists and technicians who should, by virtue of Seerbacker's ploy, occupy the floe when the Russians arrived. Gant turned the aircraft, and headed down the floe, directly in the line of the runway. He kept the Firefox completely straight on course. He would need his own tracks on his return.

The grey sea was ahead of him. He searched for any sign of the Russian submarine. There was nothing. Probably, the captain had decided not to surface until he arrived and stopped engines at the Pequod's position, something to do with psychological surprise. Whatever it was, Gant was grateful on behalf of Seerbacker and his crew. No one would visually sight the Firefox.

He turned the plane in a semi-circle, lined up on his own tyre tracks in the surface snow, and opened the throttles. Almost immediately, he felt the restraint of the surface snow, the inability of the aircraft with normal take-off power to accelerate sufficiently. He could not use too much power. It would have the effect of digging in the nose, changing the relative airflow over the surfaces of the plane. He would, in fact, slow the plane if he used more power. There was little impression of speed until he passed over the spot on the ice where he had parked, and joined the smoothed, polished surface of the ice-runway blasted out for him by Peck and his men. Only now could he see the ridge, a tiny hump ahead of him. He could not see, in the poor visibility, the gap of thirty feet that had been carved in its face. The undercarriage shook free of the restraining snow, and he felt the plane lurch forward as if freed from glue or treacle. Now he was able to open the throttles, push up the rpm, and gather speed. The only impression of speed was from the crinkled, roughened edge of the runway as it flowed past him at an increasing rate. He had to be right in the centre of the crude runway because he couldn't use the brakes to steer on the ice. They would have no effect. The rudder would not operate effectively until he reached a speed of eighty-five knots. At that moment he was at a little more than fifty.

As his eyes strained into the shredding mist, he heard, coming from a great distance, but with utter clarity, Seerbacker's voice.

'Good luck, man. Can't stop to talk, we've got visitors!' The voice had come from the handset.

His body was chilled, but he sweated. The second it took for him to pass into that region of speed which returned the power of steering to him seemed like an age. Then his speed topped ninety knots, and he centred the Firefox smoothly on the runway. He eased open the throttles, and the rpm needle seemed to leap with a jerk across the face of the dial. He saw the gap rushing at him; now that his eyes had a point of focus in the diffused whiteness of the floe, he was suddenly aware of his speed, transferred from his dials to the landscape. In cold air, he recited to himself, he needed less distance for take off. He did not believe it, not for a split-second.

The gap leapt at him, the distance it had been from him eaten by the huge engines. He was through the gap at 150 knots, and 170 was his take-off speed. He shoved the throttles into reheat, and pulled back on the stick. He dare not now plough back into the soft surface snow where Peck had had no time to clear the runway.

He could see the snow — he swore that he could see it, the point where the runway of ice ended. It was impossible. It passed under the plane's belly as he hauled back on the stick. He knew the undercarriage was clear of the floe, yet there was no impression of climbing.

In the rear-view mirror, Gant saw a cloud of snow belly out behind him, caused by the sudden downthrust of the jets. The Firefox squatted, it seemed for an instant, nose-high, then, like a limb tearing itself free of restraining, glutinous mud, the aircraft pulled away from the floe. Gant trimmed flaps up, and retracted the undercarriage. The airspeed indicator flicked over, and he pushed the throttles forward. The plane kicked him in the back, and he felt the anti-G suit compensate for the sudden surge of acceleration. He checked the fuel flow, saw that all the needles were in the green, and hauled the aircraft into a vertical climb.

The climb towards the cloud took no more than a few seconds. As he entered the cloud, the Mach-meter crossed the figure 1 — then 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4…

The Firefox burst out of the cloud at 22,000 feet, into dazzling sunlight, cloudless, vast blue.

He had taken off heading due north. Now he set his course, punching out the coordinates for his crossing-point on the Finnish coast. He banked the plane round to a heading of 210 degrees, still climbing. The maximum altitude of which the Firefox was reputedly capable was in excess of 120,000 feet — more than twenty-five miles high. Gant intended to use as much of that staggering height as he could. It was unlikely, he knew, that he would be able to avoid infra-red detection, even at that height. However, moving as fast as the aircraft was capable, in a vast leap over the Barents Sea, it would be impossible for any interception to take place. A little before he crossed the coast, he would descend to sea level, and begin his complicated, top-speed dash across Finland to the Gulf of Bothnia, and Stockholm.

There was no aircraft that could touch him, no missile that could home on him, at that height, that speed. He smiled to himself as the altimeter indicated 50,000 feet and still climbing. Now, he thought, now he could put the Firefox through its paces, really fly the great plane…

There was a fierce, cold joy in him, his closest approximation to an ecstatic emotion. There was nothing to compare, he knew, not with this.

He had read the army psychiatrist's report in Saigon — he had broken into the records office, late at night. An emotional cripple, that's what they had called him, though not in those words — an emotional cripple scarred for life by his early experiences. That Clarkville crap that he had fed the head-shrinker, he'd based his judgement on that, his judgement of a man who had flown more than fifty combat missions, who was the best, the judgement of a fat-assed head-shrinker hundreds of miles from the nearest 'Cong soldier, or missile-launcher.

He calmed the adrenalin that was beginning to course through his system. There was no point, he told himself, no point at all. He was the best. Buckholz knew it, knew it when he picked him. The Firefox climbed through 60,000 feet.

There was no thought for Upenskoy, for Baranovich, and Kreshin, and Semelovsky, and all the others. Since he had left Bilyarsk, they had dropped from his mind, gone more completely than faded, sepia photographs of the dead on wall and mantel.

Tretsov saw him punching through 60,000 feet, the vapour-trail ahead and below him was clear against the grey sea across a gap in the cloud. He knew it was Gant. There was infra-red, but no radar image on his screen. It had to be the stolen Mig-31.

Tretsov's mind worked like surgical steel. He knew what he had to do. He knew Gant's file, knew his experience in combat. His own combat experience, in the old Mig-21, was limited to engagements with Israeli Phantoms in the Middle East as a very young pilot seconded to the Egyptian Air Force, one of a select few reinforcing the inedequate pilots the Red Air Force had trained. Gant was better than he was…

On paper.

Gant had flown the Mig-31 for perhaps five hours — less. Tretsov had flown the aircraft for upwards of two hundred hours. Gant wanted to complete his mission. Tretsov had Voskov to avenge. And fear — always, the fear. He would kill Gant. He had to.

He had to get into the tail-cone of the other Mig, so that the missiles would have the best chance of homing on the heat-source of the huge engines — and because Gant's infra-red would only pick him up when it was too late to do anything about it. At that moment, watching the Mig still climbing steadily, he knew that Gant was not aware of him, that crossing his path and being on Gant's starboard flank, the infra-red's blind spot hid him temporarily. He would have to slot in swiftly behind the American, and then…

The Mig moved above him now, through his own cruising height of 70,000 feet, still climbing. He changed course, still holding a visual sighting on the contrail, confirming the information of his screen. He eased the Firefox PP 2 in behind the American until the bright orange blip on the screen was directly ahead of him, along the central ranging bar. The thought-guided weapons system launched two of the Anab missiles and he watched them slide up the ranging bars, homing on the brighter blip of the American's heat-source.

The ECM equipment bleeped horrendously in Gant's earphones, tearing at his memory. He saw the two missiles, sliding up the ranging bars towards him. Impossible, but there… The mind deliberated, refused to comprehend, sought the source of the heat-seeking missiles — even as the body responded, seized the electronic means of survival, reaching back into old patterns and grabbing at an old technique.

There was one, he knew, of avoiding infra-red missiles — only one chance. It had been used by Israeli pilots in the Six-Day War, and by Americans in Vietnam. If he could change direction with sufficient suddenness, then the heat-source from his engines would be lost to the tracking sensors in the nose of the missiles and they would be unable to maintain or regain contact with the Firefox.

He chopped the throttles, pulled the stick back and over into a zoom climb, seeking to bend the plane's course at an acute angle to his former course, removing the heat-source of his engines from the sensors of the closing missiles. He rolled the aircraft to the right at the same time, and allowed the nose to drop, following a curve which brought him under the line of the missile's path. His vision tunnelled with the G-effect. He stared at the G-meter, and saw that he was pulling plus 8-G. If his vision narrowed any more, he knew it would be the direct precursor of a black-out. Ten G, and he would black out for certain, and the plane could go out of control. All his vision now showed him was the ominous G-meter, the pressure suit a distant sensation as it clamped on his legs and stomach. He cursed the fact of finding himself with a lower G-tolerance at that critical moment in time.

The missiles, suddenly and violently altered in position on the screen, slid past him on their original course, past the point in space and time of expected impact. They had lost the scent and would continue, vainly, until their fuel ran out and they dropped into the sea.

He eased back on the stick, and his vision opened, like blinds being drawn in a room. His speed was beginning to fall off, and he found himself sweating desperately. He had almost been taken; like an inexperienced boy. There was nothing on the screen. Tretsov, though Gant did not know it, was still directly behind him and in the blind spot of the infra-red detection. A sense of panic mounted in him. He had to find the enemy visually, or not at all. He was blind, a blind man in the same room as a psychopath. The cold fear trickled down his body, inside the pressure-suit. He suspected the nature of the enemy, but would not admit it yet.

The pilot of the other plane — aircraft it had to be had obviously climbed to follow him, angry no doubt at his failure to press home the surprise, make the quick kill.

In the rear-view mirror, Gant caught a glint of sun-light off a metal surface. Still nothing on the radar. Now he knew for certain. Baranovich and Semelovsky had not immobilised the second Firefox by means of the hangar fire. Somehow, whatever damage that had been done had been repaired, and they had sent it after him.

Now he felt very cold. The rivulets of sweat beneath his arms chilled his sides, his waist. Beneath the pressure-suit, he could sense the clammy coldness of his vest. The other plane was the equal of his, the mirror-image — and the pilot was vastly more experienced…

The mind proceeded, its infection of imagination unabated, raging in his system while the body calculated that if they continued on their climb turn, the Russian would intercept him. The eyes picked up the glint of light again in the mirror, the hands pushed open the throttles savagely, and the body was comforted by the release of energy from the huge turbines. The body was pressed back into the couch.

The body stopped the climb and pulled the Firefox even more sharply to the left. The Russian kept with him, coming inside him to the left, closing the range. Gant pulled even tighter to the left, then straightened out with a suddenness that caused the inertia of the head to bang the helmet against the cockpit. His hand operated the lever, and the couch dropped into its 'battle position', flattening the body almost to the horizontal.

In the mirror, the Russian stayed with him, and the body was only able to hold off the hunter behind from an optimum firing position which the Russian pilot would now be seeking, now that he had wasted two of his four missiles. He might even be closing for a cannon burst, to cripple and slow his quarry.

The man was good, the mind admitted, overheating with its own fever. It was unable to free itself from past and future, the moments before, the moments to come. He had been taken — whatever he did, the Russian would stay with him, behind him, closing the range.

The body registered the appearance of the second Firefox on the screen as an orange blip. It was old information, useless to the body. He already knew what plane it was tucked behind him.

The body tried another strategem, because the Russian's plane was coming into the 'up-sun' position. Gant flicked the aircraft to the left, then continued into a barrel-roll. At the same time, he saw in the mirror the series of ragged puffs of mist from the wings of the Russian plane, the burst of cannon fire they signified. Orange globules drifted with apparent slowness towards him, accelerating as under a great depth of water to overtake him. Tretsov had fired because he, too, was on edge, anxious to end the developing drama, make the fictitious quick kill. The power of his aircraft lulled him into precipitate action.

The Russian, now that Gant was in the roll and realising that the cannon burst had gone wide, would expect him to turn into the line of the sun. Instead, he held the roll another ninety degrees, checked and pulled on the stick — the Firefox shuddered through its length, and Gant's stomach muscles cramped up, the vision narrowing again to the long tunnel. He screamed into the face-mask to reduce the effects of the mounting, stunning G-force. The G-meter registered plus 9, he saw with his severely limited vision of the control panel.

As he came out of the roll, he saw the Russian plane ahead of him. The mind shouted with relief, the sudden prospect of an optimal firing position as his vision cleared and he saw the Russian plane emerging from the expanding diaphragm of the lens his vision had become. He was in the Russian's tail cone, at a range of six hundred yards. He thought, and two Anab missiles were launched. The aircraft shuddered again, straightened, and he watched the missiles slide home. He had aimed via the aiming system, a reflective panel in front of the windscreen, since he had no guidance just as the Russian had possessed none. The thought-guidance system was linked to the radar, not infra-red.

Tretsov had been unable to direct the missiles once he had fired, without the radar image, and Gant now saw, with a stunned sense of defeat, that he was unable to do so either. He saw the Russian pilot use his own trick, chopping the throttles and pulling the aircraft into a climb and roll to the right. The Anabs drove harmlessly past, seeking the heat-source the Russian had whisked away from them.

Gant realised that the mind had interfered with the body, infected it. It was like the last days in Vietnam, before the hospital. A sense of the failure of the past, and a present inadequacy, crushed him for a moment. He was flying badly now, as then — on raw nerves and a draining supply of mental energy. He was afraid again. He could be dead — already the matrix of circumstances which had made his death inevitable might have been established. It might already be too late to initiate an action that would save him.

The body, functioning a split second below its unimpaired best, wrenched the plane to the right. Again, the G-forces momentarily stupefied body and mind. Vision closed in. He followed the Russian. He had been too quick, too eager, squeezing the thought like a firing-button, loosing the missiles.

It was too late to calm himself. He was committed now. He was the electronic chessmaster who had lifted his hand from the piece he had elected to move. There was no going back, no reappraisal. He had to fly as he was, the system buckling under the flow of emotion, the adrenalin pumping through him, memory flickering on a screen as if lit by flames.

He eased the controls, and the grey Arctic Ocean swung slowly across his head as his eyes quartered the airspace. The search was frantic because he had lost the Russian again. The sea slid down behind his shoulder. Then his eyes caught a reflection of light in the mirror. He had found the Russian, who had used Gant's own trick of the barrel-roll. He was now behind him, closing the range rapidly, coming for the kill — and making certain that Gant would have no time, no room, in which to wriggle away; small fish from hungry predator. The body recognised that the Russian was good — the mind gibbered that he was dead already.

Gant trod the left rudder, and smacked the stick hard over, pulling the Firefox to the left, seeing as he did so a missile flick away from the Russian plane, bright, mesmeric orange. He wrenched the column back, feeling the G-forces sagging him deep into the couch, the awful pressure for a moment on legs and stomach and the mask pulling at the flesh of his face, his head pinned to his chest…

The mind retreated from the sudden pain, leaving the clarity of the body that he needed. Then the plane kicked in response to his hand on the column and there was a wild shuddering through its length.

He was in a flat spin, the nose of the plane pitching fifteen degrees and more above and below the horizon. There was a moment of relief as the Anab was left targetless high above him — then alarm spread as the G-pressure mounted on the meter, through 8G, towards 9-G. His airspeed plummeted towards the 100 knot marker.

There was a clicking in his headphones as the automatic igniters worked madly to prevent a flame-out in the huge turbines behind him. The disturbed airflow of the spin was dousing the engines like a liquid, and they were being relit every half second. His eyes flicked to the rpm gauges, and saw that they were down to sixty per cent and the needles flickering. Before he realised it, he had tumbled through eight thousand feet, the altimeter unwinding madly….

He lost all sight of the Russian aircraft, but Tretsov had watched him, and thrust his own aircraft into a dive. The American was a sitting target.

Gant went through the SOP for a flat spin, pushing the column forward. Nothing happened. The Firefox did not respond. Now, the Russian above him and no doubt following him down had no existence or reality. Now he was fighting the plane itself as it plunged out of control towards the sea. He moved the column back and forth, jockeyed the throttles to get the nose down and to give him better airflow over the elevators. He was trying to put the plane into a more nose-down attitude in order to pick up speed and regain control.

For perhaps two seconds, nothing happened, except the continued chatter of the auto-ignition and the unwinding of the altimeter. Already he was down to thirty thousand feet, and still falling like a leaden leaf. In desperation, he reached his hand for the controls, and dumped the undercarriage to provide a sudden shock of drag on the plane — something the body remembered from a conversation, a story long before. The tail lifted with a twitch, and the nose dipped suddenly and the spin steepened. He applied opposite rudder, and opened the throttles. He was twenty thousand feet up, the altimeter still unwinding but he was back in control. He exerted pressure on the column to level out, and retracted the undercarriage. He pulled the column steadily towards him, and eased the throttles further open. The plane began to level out. The body breathed, its first dragging inhalation since the spin had begun.

Then he saw with an icy shock that the Russian was a bright glow on the screen. The pilot had followed him down, battening on him as he recovered from the spin. The speed of his approach, Gant calculated, was in excess of Mach 1.6. The Russian knew he could kill, that he could get close enough to finish Gant. There was to be no margin for error, no slight gap through which brilliance or luck might slip.

Gant saw him in the mirror, an image leaping at him. The mind cracked open, gibbering in the moment of its death. The orange globules that sprang out of the puffs of mist at the wing edges chased him at a frightening speed, overhauling him. He flung the plane aside, as if trying to avoid some charging animal, and saw in the mirror the Russian turning to follow him, turning, inside Gant's heat-cone, jockeying for the optimum position with one missile left.

There was a false relief that he knew was vapid and unreal even as he felt it; to have escaped the cannon fire was meaningless, a prolongation of seconds.

The body, struggling to master the crying mind, fought to regain control. His hand opened the throttles and he eased the column back and to the right. The mind cried out for something to fire at the tailing Russian, something that would operate on an enemy behind.

The mind's imperative overrode the body. It was a command the body would never have considered. The mind screamed the order to the thought-guidance system, and the last of the decoys in the Rearward Defence Pod was jettisoned. There was a blinding light in the rear mirror that burned eyesight as the decoy heat-source, the incandescent ball, detached itself and hung for a moment in the air. Then the mirror erupted in burning light, brighter than the ball. The body, stunned by its own apparent inactivity, sensed the shock-wave.

Gant held the Firefox in the tight turn. As he steadied the aircraft, there was nothing within the circle he was describing in the air except a pall of black, oily smoke, lit from within by livid, orange flame. Glistening fragments of metal tumbled down from the smoke-pall, like metal leaves turning in the sunlight.

He understood what had happened. While the mind spewed its relief, its incoherent sense of escape and victory, it realised that the incandescent ball of fire released from the tail of the Firefox had been greedily swallowed by one of the huge intakes of the Russian Firefox and it had exploded instantaneously.

Gant wanted to throw up. He choked on his vomit, preventing it from filling the face-mask and suffocating him. The mind invaded the body, and he realised that he was shaking all over.

While he remained capable of effort, he switched in the auto-pilot and then punched in, hesitantly and with a vast effort of memory, the coordinates of his course. The Firefox banked round, steadied, and headed for Finland, while he lay back in the couch, weak, empty, shaking.

Eventually he knew he would recover. Then he would take over the manual control of the plane. But not yet, not just yet…

The Mig-31, NATO codenamed Firefox, and the single, priceless example of its type, cruised at 80,000 feet, at a speed of Mach 3.7, towards the hidden coast of Finland.